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April is Autism Acceptance Month! You can learn more about it, as well as find a lot of great resources about autism, at the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, including their Autism Acceptance Month website. It’s important when seeking out representation or educational material about autism to research depictions by autistic people themselves. Today, I wanted to highlight some books by autistic authors to pick up this Autism Acceptance Month. Many of these also have autistic main characters, but not all of them.
Several of these books also are relevant to 2024 Read Harder Challenge tasks, including tasks #2 and #19. Many of them also count for task #12: “Read a genre book (SFF, horror, mystery, romance) by a disabled author.” The question of whether autism is a disability or not is a thorny one: most legal and insurance definitions include it, and many autistic people agree (including the ASAN, which describes itself as a disability rights movement), but not all autistic people identify as disabled.
This is only a small sample of the many excellent books by autistic authors worth reading! You can find more at this very helpful website: The Autism Books by Autistic Authors Project. You can browse by genre or age category, and it also has a list of upcoming releases!
Here are just a few books by autistic authors to read for Autism Acceptance Month — and all year.
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Most of the books on this list are fiction, but here’s a memoir about an autistic woman who, despite identifying as autistic as a teen, wasn’t able to get diagnosed until her mid-thirties. She talks about the difficulty of growing up neurodivergent without accommodations or understanding from the people around her, including the destructive coping mechanisms she used to get by. Brady is a comedian, so she tells even the difficult parts of this journey with a sense of humor, leading up to her breakout appearance on Taskmaster.
The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean
Devon is a book eater: she sustains herself by absorbing books, not food. But when her son is born a mind eater, she has to go on the run from The Family, who would make him a weapon. She’s looking for treatment to keep him from having to kill to survive, but finding the person who invented these pills would be hard enough without also having to evade The Family. This doesn’t have an autistic main character, but the author is autistic.