Letters to My Weird Sisters, Joanne Limburg
Letters to My Weird Sisters, Joanne Limburg
List: $19.99 | Sale: $13.99
Club: $9.99

Letters to My Weird Sisters
On Autism and Feminism

Author: Joanne Limburg

Narrator: Jennifer Smith

Unabridged: 9 hr 10 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/08/2022


Synopsis

An autistic feminist author looks at women's history, in search of her 'weird sisters.'

It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it.

An autism diagnosis in midlife enabled Joanne Limburg to finally make sense of why her emotional expression, social discomfort and presentation had always marked her as an outsider.

Eager to discover other women who had been misunderstood in their time, she writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four 'weird sisters' from history, addressing topics including autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disability rights and the appalling punishments that have been meted out over centuries to those deemed to fall short of the norm.

This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanizes women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by 'weird sisters' everywhere.

About Joanne Limburg

Joanne Limburg is the author of The Woman Who Thought Too Much, Small Pieces, A Want of Kindness, and three collections of poetry: Feminismo, which was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, Paraphernalia, a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, and The Autistic Alice. Her children's poetry collection, Bookside Down, was runner-up for the CLiPPA Poetry Award. She lectures at Cambridge University's Institute of Continuing Education and lives in Cambridge with her husband and son.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Emma on December 28, 2021

My one complaint about this phenomenal book is that while it deals exclusively with the intersection of gender and neurodivergence, Limburg at no point acknowledges that many non-binary people, especially those who were assigned female, as well as trans men, will be able to identify strongly with th......more

Goodreads review by G on October 29, 2022

"autistic = perseverating on details others discard, as in a poem: the tension between the poetic line and its grammar'. That’s as good a definition of autism as I’ve ever read, and reminds me of the value of the unclassified routes down which our autistic brains so often travel. Speed, familiarity......more

Goodreads review by Samantha on January 30, 2023

Found this hard to get into at first just because of the style it’s written (each chapter is a letter from the author to another woman of history with autism) but once I did it was great. The author did an awesome job explaining how it feels to have autism rather than explaining what autism is.......more

Goodreads review by Naja on October 11, 2021

Denne anmeldelse er også på min blog og instagram. “We are, all of us, striving constantly to pass those normality exams, to take our raw and boundless selves and squash them into the forms of neater and nicer girls.” Letters to my werid sisters er opbygget som 4 breve fra forfatteren til 4 historiske......more

Goodreads review by Viv on March 11, 2023

I thought this book was absolutely wonderful - a creative and moving way to highlight the challenges of being a woman with autism. Highly recommended.......more