I loved the voice Katherine gave to autistic women in her book The Electricity of Every Living Thing, and during this conversation, we’ll get into how Katherine navigated her journey of first self diagnosing and then seeking out an official diagnosis and what that meant to her. I’m grateful to Katherine May for opening my eyes to the possibility that I’m autistic and to help me with understanding that I’ve imprinted on neurotypical but not one at heart. Perhaps I’m hoping for a better life story, a coherent, tidy narrative arc finally drawing my scattergun life together? Her journey is about discovering where she can compromise, where she can’t, and building upon the relationships that matter to her; she forces herself to hold hands, (something she finds ‘grindingly’ uncomfortable) to support a friend though a cow phobia. Bombardment of irritating sounds effects: kissing noises, heavy breathing, snoring, drumroll and dozens more.

It feels as though I have two different selves; a desperate, animal self, emerging in chaos, and a calm, wise human, squinting to recognize her twin. The trip, she hoped, would allow an escape from daily constraints, a space for her mind to soar, and also a chance to make sense of herself. Katherine Mayis the New York Times bestselling author of Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times. And then you kind of go back and forth in your own process of discovering your autism and kind of making sense of that, and also kind of really connecting the dots of how you have lived your life up to that point. With a narrative assist from Stanton, the result is a consistently titillating and often moving story of human struggle as well as an insider glimpse into the days when Times Square was considered the Big Apple’s gloriously unpolished underbelly.

And that’s something I think about a lot and talk about is this idea that our, our neurodivergent kids really demand that we do the deep inner work, if we want to have meaningful relationships with them, support them show up for them in the way that they need. Though her work was far from the Broadway shows she dreamed about, it eventually became all about the nightly hustle to simply survive.

And it’s that same kind of tension, that disconnect between accepting what is and leaning into that, and that the pain can often be caused by trying to, to avoid or deny or not really look at what’s going on. I don’t think we have those conversations very much in the mainstream, you know, I don’t think we often allow the possibility that there are some parts of life that will come to us, and they are negative, and they’re unavoidable. FTC Disclosure: I borrowed an electronic copy of from my library, and received nothing from the author or the publisher in exchange for my honest review. And this sense that, finally here was me, he was somebody whose experience was so similar to mine, and I’ve never heard it before. When you’re parenting a neurodivergent child, you don’t get to just follow the kind of set pattern that everyone else is following you know, you have to think everything through and you have to learn different skills and different ways to do things.In this adaptation, Katherine’s story is recreated as an immersive sensory journey detailing a different way of being in the world -and becomes a different way of experiencing an audio drama. And, when new stresses arise with the arrival of her son Bert, Katherine feels her coping strategies are stretched, and worsened by tongue-wagging mothers. We can’t just kind of glide through and do all the usual things, we have to to really lean in and do that work. So it means that I wrote Electricity about five years ago, and it came out three years ago in the UK.