CLEM BASTOW and JO CASE (eds) Someone Like Me: An anthology of non-fiction by Autistic writers. Reviewed by Kylie Mason

This diverse anthology challenges stereotypes by bringing together Autistic women and gender-diverse writers to share their experiences.

In their introduction to Someone Like Me, editors Clem Bastow and Jo Case say:

Spending time with these twenty-five essays, piecing them together, is a first step towards expanding your understanding of Autism – not as a collection of clinical traits, or a series of popular media tropes, but as it manifests in specific Autistic people’s lives.

And while that statement feels modest, in focusing the anthology on women and gender-diverse writers, and the intersectionality with Autism those identities brings, the collection Bastow and Case have brought together is actually extraordinary. Here are so many Autistic voices that have been sidelined and ignored even within the Autistic community, yet are essential to understanding how profoundly individual the experience of being Autistic can be: Autistic parents, Autistic non-binary and trans people, Autistic people of colour, and all the ways those identities can intersect, are explored in this anthology.

Anna Whateley and Kate Gordon’s ‘When everyone else has a conversation’ – a conversation about neurodivergent conversations – and Kay Kerr’s ‘Dance like nobody (neurotypical) is watching’ shine a light on parenting as an Autistic person, as does Khadija Gbla’s ‘Building an intersectional legacy’. Kerr’s declaration really gets to the heart of what it means to have to fight every day for visibility and support for yourself and your child:

Raising an Autistic child as an Autistic parent … is … intense, man … It’s about outside perception, namely that of a shifting world full of old structures and systems built with outdated and destructive understandings of what being Autistic means … About us parents … who want greater things, for both our world and our children.

Gbla’s essay takes this idea further. For Gbla, visibility as an Autistic black person is essential in expanding wider society’s idea of who can be Autistic, but being visible comes with risks far greater than just being thought ‘weird’ or ‘different’: it comes with the risk of real danger from authority figures, thanks to the racism endemic in our society. Speaking out about her experiences, and those of her child, is one way Gbla is trying to make the world safer and more accepting for all people:

Think of how, even in your neurodivergent spaces and disabled spaces, the same voice is still not given to us, the black and Indigenous people, in our expression of our own Autism, our expression of our neurodivergence, here in this space. It’s still racism. It’s still the expectation of a white expression of Autism.

Sara Kian-Judge’s ‘AutismDARK’ is a powerful rejection of society’s tendency to infantalise and attempt to control Autistic people. Kian-Judge explores the ways she revels in her Autism by breaking her essay into sections titled FEROCIOUS, FERAL and FREAK. Each section allows her to celebrate the ways in which she refuses to conform to neurotypical expectations, the ways in which she lives her Autism authentically. Describing her love of mosh pits, she writes one of the most effective and realistic accounts of Autistic joy I’ve ever read:

Mosh pits are among my ultimate sensory-social highs. In the pit, there’s no such thing as an excruciating feather-light touch that makes my teeth hurt, only the firm compression of thousands of hot bodies packed together like cells in a surging, heaving, writhing, pulsating beat that moves collectively in a haze of exhilarating conviction and heady sweat-scent. The rhythmic head-banging, flailing arms and running together in circles are like group stimming – and no-one thinks you’re weird for doing it there.

Kian-Judge’s piece is confronting, and deliberately so. It seeks to push against the idea of Autistic people needing to conform – to ‘mask’ – to be accepted by society by digging deep into habits that are, in Kian Judge’s words, ‘disgusting to others’. It also rejects the idea that Autistic people need to be ‘accepted’ by non-Autistic people in order to live good lives.

Pieces like Lauren Metzler’s ‘Recently I was diagnosed as Autistic’ – a graphic story about her own diagnosis – and Caitlin McGregor’s ‘Twelve haircuts’ move away from purely textual explorations of experiences of Autism. Metzler’s graphic story explores in illustrations the loss of sense of self that newly diagnosed Autistic people often feel when they realise they can no longer keep up the mask that has allowed them to participate in a neurotypical society. It also explores the important role of special interests in allowing Autistic people opportunities to decompress from a neurotypical world and experience Autistic joy.

In ‘Twelve haircuts’, McGregor uses the history of their hair in illustrations and text as an example of how Autistic people are underestimated by neurotypical people. McGregor has been cutting their own hair since they were sixteen, they say,

and I do a better job than any professional ever has. Maybe that’s because I’m no good at communicating what I want to anyone else. Maybe it’s because I know my own hair really well. Or maybe I’m just good at it.

Alongside their history of haircuts, McGregor recounts a session with a speech pathologist, the infuriating Marie, to show how communication between Autistic people and neurotypical people is often used as a diagnostic tool – neurotypicals communicate in the ‘right’ way while Autistic people have ‘communication deficits’. ‘Twelve haircuts’ is an insightful study of how Autistic people are often taught to doubt themselves and their ways of being in the world in order to make neurotypical people more comfortable.

It’s clear that all the writers invited to take part in Someone Like Me have revelled in the opportunity to write freely and authentically about their Autistic lives and to have that writing edited by people who understand some of what they’ve experienced. Each essay is deeply felt and open, creative and illuminating. From stories of being diagnosed to accounts of living in a world that doesn’t understand Autism and outright dismisses most Autistic experiences, the pieces commissioned by Bastow and Case emphasise the variety of lives to be found in the Autistic community.

Teaching non-Autistic people about Autism is not the point of this anthology, though there’s no doubt neurotypical readers will learn something from the amazing writers and artists included. Someone Like Me is an opportunity for Autistic people to explore their experience of Autism outside of how neurotypical society tells them they should. To show how it feels to be Autistic in a world that sees Autism as a quirky difference at best, and at worst, a tragedy. It’s also an important opportunity for Autistic people of identities outside of the stereotypical white boys and men to feel seen and to feel a sense of community – something we’ve been without for so long.

Clem Bastow and Jo Case Someone Like Me: An anthology of non-fiction by Autistic writers  UQP 2025 PB 352pp $36.99

Kylie Mason is an Autistic and ADHD editor and writer living and working on Bidjigal land (Sydney).

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Tags: Anna | Whateley, anthologies, Australian writers, Autism, Caitlin | McGregor, Clem | Bastow, essays, Jo | Case, Kate | Gordon, Kay | Kerr, Khadija | Gbla, Lauren | Metzler, memoir, neurodiversity, Sara | Kian-Judge