My Forest Library

This review of What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic is for Disability Book Week.

• What age demographic is the book written for? Adults, but would also be fine for younger audiences.
• Does the author self-identify as disabled? Yes
• What disability is discussed in the book? Autism/Neurodivergence
• Does the book follow the APA Style Guide for disability language? Yes

In the memoir What I Mean When I Say I’m Autistic, author Annie Kotowicz lays out an incredibly well written description of every aspect of her own life with autism that other people might be interested in knowing about. Kotowicz never claims to speak for all autistic people, but rather states in her introduction that in telling others about how autism affects her own life and way of thinking, she hopes to not only enlighten neurotypical readers about her autistic life but also to show her autistic readers that there are others out there like them.

As I, myself, am an autistic woman, I am keenly aware of the difficulties that people assigned female at birth face when it comes to understanding and diagnosing their autism. I’m glad that a woman wrote a memoir about her own experience with autism as so many of the books previously written on the subject were by or about cis men and boys. I hope that in the future we can have whole collections of books that discuss how gender affects autism and autistic individuals, and this book is a great stepping stone on that path.

While I can’t personally identify with every tiny detail that Kotowicz tells about her own life (if I could, that would be pretty scary!), there were still many, many moments in this memoir where I had to put the book down and say, “Huh. That applies to my own life and experiences but I never quite thought about it that way.” This memoir made me think in new ways about my own experiences with my family (most of whom are also neurodivergent, though often in ways that are different from my own autism) and about my own life history. I suspect many readers will have a similar experience and I’m excited to share this book with my close family members to see what they think of it.

Whether you are neurodivergent or autistic, or have an autistic friend or relative, I can’t recommend this book more highly. But even if you think you have no connection to autism, I still recommend this book — you will learn something. You may learn something about yourself. You may learn something about someone you know who you didn’t realize was autistic. Or you may simply learn that not every person in the world is exactly the same, and that’s okay.

I received a free copy of this book from the author in exchange for an honest review.