April 15, 2022
Amid increasing awareness of how autism manifests in girls and women, Letters to My Weird Sisters is an intimate exploration of disability, social expectation, feminism, motherhood, and trauma. Poet and memoirist Limburg (The Autistic Alice, 2017) writes to four women whose documented behavior suggests they may have been autistic. In the hands of a less skilled or less thoughtful writer, the conceit of the book could have been limiting, but Limburg has a particular gift for finding connections between her own experiences, the lives of her subjects, and broader patterns of oppression. In the writings of Virginia Woolf, Limburg finds space to explore the social anxieties that accompanied her own childhood autism, while a nonspeaking woman killed by the eugenicist policies of Nazi Germany offers a window into understanding how a limited construction of humanness continues to endanger the lives of disabled people. Too often, we glimpse the lives of historical women through a glass darkly, but this impassioned and compassionate book shines a light on disabled women whose personhood the historical record tries to obscure.
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