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ASPartOfMe
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28 Sep 2021, 7:53 am

British Comedy Guide

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Fern Brady is writing a memoir, focusing on her autism and the sexism that surrounds the condition.

The comic, who publicly shared her formal diagnosis on social media earlier this year, begins her UK-wide tour, Autistic Bikini Queen, in January, with Strong Female Character to be published by Brazen on Valentine's Day, 2023.

Her first book, it will reflect on her time spent in psychiatric care, which she dramatised in the 2016 BBC Three pilot Radges, and her experience of working as a stripper while studying in Edinburgh.

And it pledges to convey "her voice as a neurodivergent, working-class woman from Scotland to bring issues such as sex work, abusive relationships and her time spent in teenage mental health units to the page", taking "a sledgehammer to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope which is mistakenly applied to neurodiverse women."

Currently appearing with Ivo Graham and Darren Harriott in the Dave travelogue British As Folk, Brady realised that she was autistic "when I first read about it at 16 but the understanding of how it presented in women was so limited then" she told The Scotsman, expanding on her ability to "mask" the condition.

"It's not like it presents so differently in women, it's just that we are better at covering it up. When I tried to get diagnosed at 16 they said you can't have it because you've had a boyfriend, which is so stupid. When I finally got diagnosed this year the doctor said you would not believe how often I hear this from women.”

“I've always had people from my audience coming up and telling me I have autism and also a lot of my audience are autistic" Brady explained to the Scotsman."

Nevertheless, it was the pressures of lockdown that prompted the bisexual comic to seek a formal diagnosis.

"On my last tour I'd been getting more and more ill from the strains of it, but was so busy I didn't have time to address it" she said. "Lockdown was a good opportunity to do that. The odd thing was I didn't feel better when I got diagnosed. I felt really grossed out, like I wished I could take it back. I didn't feel catharsis or anything."

Thankfully, stand-up has been an outlet for the condition: "Definitely comedy's the only job where it's been helpful for me," she said. "I kept getting described as provocative or really blunt and honest as if this was a persona I was putting on, when the persona I was putting on was when I had to go and work as a secretary, or pretty much any other job where I felt suffocated by trying to act normal all the time."

However, "it's not great being autistic in the world of TV and stuff".


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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


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30 Sep 2021, 9:56 am

Brazen wins five-way auction for Brady's debut

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Octopus imprint Brazen has won a five-way auction for the debut book from Scottish comedian and writer Fern Brady about her experience of autism.

Romilly Morgan, publishing director at Brazen, acquired UK and Commonwealth rights from Jess Molloy at Curtis Brown for Strong Female Character, dubbed “a game-changing memoir on sexism and neurodiversity", by the publisher. It will be published in 2023.


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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


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24 Jan 2022, 10:30 am

Everything ends up about death and shagging’: Fern Brady on comedy, autism and intrusive thoughts

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In 2018, Fern Brady’s comedy career was taking off. Fresh from supporting Frankie Boyle on tour, she filmed Live at the Apollo in London, then took a last-minute gig in Manchester the following day. On the way back to the capital, she was offered a last-minute audition for Have I Got News for You. Her brain screamed no, but she said yes. When she got to the audition, she couldn’t function, freezing into silence.

Now, she knows this was an autistic shutdown. Brady was diagnosed early last year. When lockdown brought live comedy to a crashing halt, disrupting her routine, she’d been plunged into frequent “crippling” crises. These can manifest as destructive outbursts (meltdowns) or silent withdrawal (shutdowns) and she discovered they can be exacerbated by “masking” – changing your instinctive behaviours to appear “normal”. It’s taken her all year to “start to unlearn these bad habits”, she says as we sit at either end of a velvet sofa in a cafe in Catford, London.

On stage, Brady is cool, cutting and delightfully deadpan, delivering scathing critiques of social norms. Her performances often escalate from classic standup into surreal finales – at the 2019 Edinburgh fringe she lost her voice after daily shows ended in her screaming about existential dread while a video of a hamster played behind her. It earned her four-star reviews and a BBC standup special.

While she’s now a regular on panel shows and podcasts, she says: “I’ll always feel most relaxed doing standup. When I’m doing standup, I’m being the most myself.

Her diagnosis came nearly 20 years after she’d first read a description of autism and felt a jolt of recognition. A year on, it’s helped make sense of a lot: her bafflement with social etiquette and exhaustion with socialising, sensory overload in noisy and bright spaces, difficulty identifying her own emotions, and a need for routine. She’s now working on her first book, Strong Female Character, a memoir and in-depth exploration of what it means to be an autistic woman.

But if you’re anticipating jokes about neurodivergence in her new show, think again. Yes, it is called Autistic Bikini Queen, but that’s only because Brady, who loves weightlifting, was doing bodybuilding at the time she named it.

While she did write some autism jokes, she’s wary of stripping the topic of nuance. “But I am autistic, so the whole show’s from that perspective,” she says. “I realised every standup show I had done beforehand might as well have been called, ‘Hey Fern, do you know you’re autistic?’” . Her 2016 show Male Comedienne centred on being excluded from a female comedians’ brunch and her difficulty communicating with other women, while 2019’s Power and Chaos examined how women are socialised to be polite.

In Autistic Bikini Queen, Brady will explore “my fear of being attacked when I leave the house. It’s the closest I’ve felt to being able to do relatable stuff, weirdly.” She develops topics from previous shows – such as monogamy and marriage – observing how traditions like wedding vows and stag dos dissolve into farce when examined too closely. There’s material on the royals and kink-shaming too, with characteristic sprinklings of class, Catholicism and death.

“No matter how hard I try to be mainstream, it always comes back to this really goth sensibility,” Brady says. “Inevitably, everything ends up being about death and shagging.”

As she continues writing Strong Female Character, she’s finding the positives of autism. “It’s what helped me go into comedy,” she says. “Autistics tend to thrive when they can make a career out of their special interests. You just have to hope that they overlap.”

The line I bolded was really funny to me.


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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


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26 Jan 2022, 10:49 am

Wow, Fern is on the spectrum!

I first encountered her a few years ago, and then only because my Google Alert for "Doug Stanhope" came up with an article about her, in which she mentioned Stanhope as an influence:

https://www.list.co.uk/article/88078-my-comedy-hero-fern-brady-on-doug-stanhope/

I was quite taken by her unusual style of comedy.

Darron


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26 Jan 2022, 10:54 am

ASPartOfMe wrote:
“I realised every standup show I had done beforehand might as well have been called, ‘Hey Fern, do you know you’re autistic?"

The line I bolded was really funny to me.

Yep!
And it also reminds me of this meme:

Image

Darron


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27 Jan 2022, 7:11 am

will have to look for this one thanks for the post!


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27 Jan 2022, 9:17 am

autisticelders wrote:
will have to look for this one thanks for the post!



This is Fern, performing one of her pre-diagnosis specials.

Darron


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12 Feb 2023, 10:50 am

Fern Brady: ‘Stripping and Taskmaster are the most autism-friendly jobs I’ve had’

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When comedian Fern Brady was diagnosed with autism in early 2021, she fired out a tweet to her followers, then added a hastily written follow-up, in a bid to make the news seem ‘flippant’.

‘I’m not gonna go on about it and make it the only thing about me,’ she reassured fans, in a line that went viral and divided the online neurodivergent community – some praised her for sharing, others asked why she didn’t want to make it part of her identity.

‘When I first did that tweet, it was going back to the usual thing of “l don’t want my autism to make you uncomfortable, I’m not going to be a nuisance,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.

‘It wasn’t a relief [to be diagnosed]. It was the opposite. I went through about 18 months of being really sad about it.

I thought, everyone’s going to think I’m stupid now and everyone’s going to think that I’m incapable. Also, I thought people were going to stop offering me work.’

The opposite was true. Work requests flooded in, but instead of stand-up gigs and panel show slots, they were documentaries and events related to autism.

‘I hate it when people become campaigners for a single issue,’ Fern admits. ‘I do just want to be a comedian.’

And yet, two years on, she’s written a memoir, Strong Female Character, which documents how autism has shaped her life. So, what changed?

‘I wrote the book because I realised when I saw other people talk about their autism diagnosis who I thought were cool and accomplished, it made me feel a million times better about my own diagnosis,’ she explains.

Her public reception on Taskmaster – when she was praised after visibly stimming (a repetitive movement used to self-sooth) – was confirmation she’d made the right choice.

In hindsight, some key signs were always there for her, says Fern. She hated being held as a baby, was best friends with a tree in infant school, and had a compulsion to scratch her arms to shreds after anybody touched them.

However, nobody ever talks about the internal experience of autism, she adds.

‘Imagine you’re at a party and you’re trying to talk to a group of people, and you’re having to pretend that the lights aren’t bothering you,’ she explains.

‘All the sounds in the room make it feel like 10 radios are being played at once, and people keep touching you or cheek-kissing you, and you don’t want to grimace and look put off by it.

‘When you’re concentrating on hiding your autism that much, you do end up blurting out quite blunt stuff.’

However, nobody ever talks about the internal experience of autism, she adds.

‘Imagine you’re at a party and you’re trying to talk to a group of people, and you’re having to pretend that the lights aren’t bothering you,’ she explains.

‘All the sounds in the room make it feel like 10 radios are being played at once, and people keep touching you or cheek-kissing you, and you don’t want to grimace and look put off by it.

‘When you’re concentrating on hiding your autism that much, you do end up blurting out quite blunt stuff.’

The public perception of autism isn’t helped by the fact that it’s still thrown around as an insult, adds Fern. ‘People will say, “someone’s a bit on the spectrum,” as a way of saying someone’s a bit of a c**t.’

To shatter misconceptions, she wanted the book to celebrate ‘the benefits to being an autistic woman’.

‘All the descriptions of us are usually deficit-based,’ says Fern. ‘We’re really pathologized, people talk about our “blunt communication style”, for example, rather than saying we’re straightforward, and we’re honest with people.’

Autistic women make inadvertent kick-ass feminists, she adds, because they ‘subvert gender cues that women are told that they have to abide by’.

‘If you’re a woman, often, you have to put lots of exclamation marks at the end of your sentences and emails to show that you’re smiling and positive,’ she says. ‘And autistic women – speaking for myself, anyway – don’t communicate in that way.’

Autism has also freed Fern from shame around sex, she says, which is no mean feat, considering her strict Catholic, working-class upbringing in the Scottish town of Bathgate.

She brilliantly never felt any qualms about her bisexuality and shares how she was recently discussing Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s series Fleabag with a friend, because she didn’t understand the hype.

‘I just didn’t see how it was groundbreaking,’ she says. ‘And she said, for a lot of women, it was empowering to see female promiscuity on screen. For me, I really don’t care what people think about who I have sex with. I couldn’t care less.’

The memoir is not about toxic positivity though and Fern doesn’t shy away from discussing the darker sides of life with autism is a neuro-typical world.

She was misdiagnosed with OCD in her teens and later advised to go on antidepressants. When the medication did little to make life feel more manageable, she started cutting herself. At 15, she took an overdose of pills and ended up in a mental health unit.

‘I think I was really privileged to get put in a mental unit, because now teenagers can’t get anything,’ she says.

Increasingly misunderstood and in trouble at school, Fern would have ‘meltdowns’ when she felt overwhelmed, which would manifest in her shouting and feeling a confusing compulsion to smash up the furniture.

By 17, her relationship with her parents grew so strained that they asked her to move out, leaving her couch surfing while completing her exams.

In the book, Fern writes of how her parents didn’t financially support her when she studied at Edinburgh university, so she ended up homeless again for a period, while she struggled to convince student finance that she needed a larger bursary.

To make ends meet, she started working in a strip club. She’d had dozens of part-time jobs by this point, spanning retail to office admin. But by chance, she realised stripping was the most autism-friendly of them all.

The moves are also far more predictable and rehearsed than you may realise, as Fern writes:

Rub leg up man’s leg; sway from side to side; rub opposite leg up man’s leg; lean in close enough that they think you’ll kiss them; pull away before they try anything; take bra off; lick right tit not left (left one inexplicably inflexible); slide down man onto floor; writhe around on floor; think what pasta to get from the Italian place at the end of my shift; the End.

Fern wants to be clear, though – she’s not telling young autistic women to run off and be strippers.

‘I just think it’s absolutely insane that one of the jobs I stayed in the longest was one that was perfectly set up for an autistic,’ she says, adding that in hindsight, she thinks some of her co-workers were also autistic.

‘Whenever you’re in groups of outsiders and on the fringes of society, that’s where you’ll find autistic people,’ she says. ‘I met really cool girls. I felt really at home there.

In 2018, Fern became the first Scottish woman to appear on Live at the Apollo and more recently, found a whole new set of fans via Tastmasker, which she names as the most inadvertently autism-friendly show she’s appeared on.

‘It was so good, because they were like, “just be yourself,” and usually when people say that it’s a lie, but we had the most fun on it,’ she says.

Since diagnosis, Fern’s had therapy and learned more about autism and coping strategies from amazing content creators online (though she notes that nobody should really be learning about their health ‘from 19-year-olds on TikTok,’ because the medical profession is so behind).

And now, Fern hopes the book will add to the women-created community resources for others out there.

‘I wrote it for young me,’ she says. ‘I think it would have helped me massively.’


Interesting interview.

News flash for those Autistic keyboard warriors who criticized her when she first came out she owes you nothing but a funny show. Her autism is her PERSONAL LIFE.

There is no correct way to feel about ones autism, you know the diversity part of neurodiversity.

When one gets diagnosed as an adult often one is finding out their conception of who they are and why things went bad is wrong. People need time to process this.


I would have thought stripping would be one of the least autistic friendly occupations. There is music, there is people yelling at you, there is touching.

I am happy things are working out for her.


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“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


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13 Feb 2023, 8:42 pm

Fern rulez!


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23 Feb 2023, 11:21 am

Book Review -The Scotsmen

Quote:
Scottish comedian Fern Brady’s autobiographical account of growing up with undiagnosed autism is sometimes not an easy read. But while detailing a life as a perpetual outsider in an unsympathetic world could have allowed her to wallow in self-pity, Brady manages to plot a course between the drama of repeated brutal encounters and her inner thoughts with a mixture of excruciating honesty and dark humour.

Having said that, she certainly doesn’t make light of her experiences, and describing her treatment at the hands of family, schools and the medical profession leaves the reader with worrying questions about how inept society is in dealing with anyone who is not neurotypical.

She offers up a great deal of information about autistic females, quoting from psychological studies in the footnotes. For instance, she explains early on that the lazy way of thinking about autism and Asperger’s – that we are all on a spectrum – is wrong. “No one is a little bit autistic,” she writes. “You’re autistic or you’re not. The spectrum describes your support needs.”

Due to medical professionals who don’t seem to grasp this, she is constantly misdiagnosed – if she could look someone in the eye, or had a boyfriend, they opined, she couldn’t have Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

The real problem, for Brady as for many autistic women, is the constant need to mask her divergent behaviour – trying to read social signals and act “normally” which, she says, “is like having a computer which should only be running two or three programmes at once but forcing it to run up to ten.” It leads to silent shutdowns, violent meltdowns and self-destructive behaviour.

I don’t know if Brady is a great writer in part because she is autistic, but her deeply personal account of bullying, stripping, homelessness and stand-up is shocking and incredibly moving – and it will make you laugh at subjects that you didn’t think possible.


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Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman


ASPartOfMe
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23 Feb 2023, 11:24 am

Book Review -The Scotsmen

Quote:
Scottish comedian Fern Brady’s autobiographical account of growing up with undiagnosed autism is sometimes not an easy read. But while detailing a life as a perpetual outsider in an unsympathetic world could have allowed her to wallow in self-pity, Brady manages to plot a course between the drama of repeated brutal encounters and her inner thoughts with a mixture of excruciating honesty and dark humour.

Having said that, she certainly doesn’t make light of her experiences, and describing her treatment at the hands of family, schools and the medical profession leaves the reader with worrying questions about how inept society is in dealing with anyone who is not neurotypical.

She offers up a great deal of information about autistic females, quoting from psychological studies in the footnotes. For instance, she explains early on that the lazy way of thinking about autism and Asperger’s – that we are all on a spectrum – is wrong. “No one is a little bit autistic,” she writes. “You’re autistic or you’re not. The spectrum describes your support needs.”

Due to medical professionals who don’t seem to grasp this, she is constantly misdiagnosed – if she could look someone in the eye, or had a boyfriend, they opined, she couldn’t have Autistic Spectrum Disorder.

The real problem, for Brady as for many autistic women, is the constant need to mask her divergent behaviour – trying to read social signals and act “normally” which, she says, “is like having a computer which should only be running two or three programmes at once but forcing it to run up to ten.” It leads to silent shutdowns, violent meltdowns and self-destructive behaviour.

I don’t know if Brady is a great writer in part because she is autistic, but her deeply personal account of bullying, stripping, homelessness and stand-up is shocking and incredibly moving – and it will make you laugh at subjects that you didn’t think possible.


_________________
Professionally Identified and joined WP August 26, 2013
DSM 5: Autism Spectrum Disorder, DSM IV: Aspergers Moderate Severity

“My autism is not a superpower. It also isn’t some kind of god-forsaken, endless fountain of suffering inflicted on my family. It’s just part of who I am as a person”. - Sara Luterman