Memoir about abusive growing undiagnosed

Post Reply New Topic

Where to start with this memoir by the Sydney journalist, writer and academic Emma A. Jane? Perhaps here: “On a good day, I can pass as normal but not for too many minutes.”

Or here: “ … having considered my time on the planet with as much perspective as I can muster, my conclusion is that the toughest parts of my life – child abuse, mental illness, undiagnosed autism, school and workplace bullying, cancer, family estrangement, relentless rape and death threats from strangers – are not isolated phenomena but complexly related.”

Diagnosis Normal is Jane’s attempt to explain this and much more, including her self-harm, suicidal ideation and hypersexuality. It’s a confronting book that moves at 100 kilometres an hour from the opening page to the final one. A lot of readers will want her to slow down, for her own good.

“I know people like me can seem alien and alienating. I realise we can be difficult, and discomfiting, and sometimes outright demented,” she writes at the end of chapter two, titled “Hello”. “Please don’t go.” She is right to ask that. This is an important book because, difficult as it is to read, it asks “normal” people to think about mental illness and sexual violence.

Despite the smorgasbord of horror, grief, regret and self-doubt, there is humour.

But the heart of her lifelong darkness is a man, a family friend, who sexually abused her from the age of seven. The author does not name him, partly because of fear of litigation, partly because he told her he would kill himself if she did. At the start of this book she does not know if he is alive or dead. By the end she does and this knowledge only continues a story that should be read.