From reading the blurb for Letters To My Weird Sisters, I was intrigued but also apprehensive. It is one of my favourite books of the year, so my apprehension wasn't borne out. When Joanne Limburg realised that she was autistic in midlife, it allowed her to better understand aspects of her life.
"I unsettle people. I am uncanny." Limburg states in the opening letter, which is addressed to the reader. Later, she says that "if you are working on the assumption that the kind of people we now call autistic have always existed, then it is not unreasonable to wonder who these weird or uncanny individuals might have been, what sort of lives they led, and how the worlds they lived in responded to them."
What follows is a series of letters to some of the women she connected with in some way during her research. The first is addressed to Virginia Woolf. The second to Adelheid Bloch, a disabled Jewish woman murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. The third to Frau V, the mother of a boy who was 'studied' by Hans Asperger. The fourth to Katharina Kepler, the mother of astronomer Johannes Kepler, who was accused of witchcraft. The final letter is addressed to Limburg's friend, Caron Freeborn, an autistic writer and poet who died in 2020.
Limburg does not posthumously identify or diagnose Woolf, Bloch, Frau V, or Kepler as autistic. Instead, she is interested in finding "who the weird women were" and examining how their weirdness "might intersect with womanhood and with the norms of femininity."
Together, the letters provide a compelling and oftentimes confronting look at what it meant to be a woman who was seen as different or other or weird or disabled or mentally ill or, in the case of Katharina Kepler, to be accused of being a witch. To essentially be considered not quite a woman. Throughout, Limburg discusses her own experiences as an autistic Jewish straight white cisgender woman. I mention these specific descriptors because Limburg examines how each of them impacts how people treat her.
Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism by Joanne Limburg is published by Atlantic Books.
I don’t use affiliate links, but if you enjoy my book reviews, you can show your support by buying me a coffee here.