Strong Female Character

Throughout childhood and young adulthood, Brady has a particularly tumultuous relationship with her parents. This tension is driven largely by her lack of diagnosis; neither her mother nor father suspect that Brady is autistic, and they therefore do not understand how to appropriately parent her in key moments. Brady describes her experience of childhood largely as one of ostracization, both outside and inside her family home. She reports receiving messaging from her parents that she was “very, very clever but also very, very bad” (13). As her mental wellbeing deteriorates during adolescence, her parents take drastic actions that further antagonize Brady. Her mother begins kicking her out of the house whenever she behaves poorly, and they eventually decide that Brady will do well Westleigh Way, a facility that turns out to be medically neglectful. These early traumatic experiences leave Brady resentful of her parents, particularly her mother.

In adulthood, Brady’s relationships with her mother and father shift, especially following her diagnosis. She finds herself reassessing a long-held belief that her mother was an entirely unsupportive figure in childhood:

When I’d wanted to do [high school courses] that were almost entirely foreign languages and Dad had mocked me and told me to do physics, she’d encouraged me. When I’d refused to do maths, she’d supported it. When I’d wanted to rent a beginner’s guide to Danish from the library or paint Chinese characters on my bedroom wall or recite French verb drills for two hours at a time, she’d been there (282-83).

This development toward a more nuanced understanding of her mother is one of the most marked shifts in Brady’s character. It is also the memoir’s conclusion point, ending the arc that began with Brady’s testy conversation with her father on the phone in the opening scene.

Conor is Brady’s long-term partner during the early stages of her comedy career and at the time of writing Strong Female Character. The book is dedicated to him. Brady describes Conor as a “peaceful Irish lad […] who’d grown up in an environment of near-monastic silence by the sea” (19). Coming from a completely different background than Brady, Conor is one of the first people in her life to notice and accommodate some of her autism symptoms, even before she receives a diagnosis. For example, he begins giving her tight hugs during meltdowns, a technique widely used to calm children with autism down during moments when they are acutely overwhelmed.

Brady’s supportive relationship with Conor is contrasted starkly with her prior romantic relationships, which were largely unsupportive. In particular, her relationship at university with a man named John became physically abusive and led to a series of emotional meltdowns and burnout for her. This extreme counterpoint emphasizes Conor’s maturity and genuine concern for Brady’s well-being, as well as the health of their relationship. In the acknowledgments section, Brady thanks Conor for “supporting me in pursuing a diagnosis, then listening to a daily, incessant stream of facts about autism for the next three years and only complaining once.” This highlights his years-long commitment to facilitating her self-discovery, an extensive form of support that inevitably appears truncated within the form of a 300-page memoir.