Summer time in the Final Draft household brings lots of new release and pre-release titles and the corresponding challenge of knowing where to start. When the titles started rolling in though it was very easy to pick up Kay Kerr’s new novel, her first aimed at adult readers because I’ve enjoyed her Young Adult writing, as well as her strong autistic characters and her approach to neurodiversity.
Kay is an author and journalist based on the Sunshine Coast, Australia. She’s the author of Please Don’t Hug Me, Social Queue, and Love & Autism. Kay’s latest novel, Might Cry Later, is our book club title for today.
Nora is home for Xmas, Actually she’s been home a little longer than that and will probably be staying a bit after.
At twenty-one and living in Melbourne Nora found her life imploding. What came next, well Nora’s not quite ready to face yet, but she came home with a brand new Autism diagnosis that no one in her family wants to talk about.
Holidays are hard enough, but as Nora watches all the people in her life gather round she questions whether her neurodiverse brain can regulate through all this stimulation.
Might Cry Later is the story of Nora and her journey through late-diagnosis of Autism. For context, and acknowledging differences in reporting, average ages for diagnosis are typically reported within childhood and females are generally diagnosed later than males.
Nora’s story of declining mental health before a diagnosis represents so many women’s experience of having their neurodiversity misunderstood or misdiagnosed on the pathway to diagnosis.
That’s the stats but what Kay Kerr gives us is the heartfelt and raw story of what that means in the real world and confronts us with the challenge that getting a diagnosis is just the beginning.
When we meet Nora at her parent’s home in the Gold Coast Hinterland it seems like she’s in paradise. Nora acknowledges how the peace and natural environment are good for her and helps her regulate a sensory system she’s learning reacts differently to other people’s. Nora’s also having to deal with how her family, and particularly her family at Xmas care little for sensory regulation if it does not fit in with a rigorous regime of decorating and social engagements.
The story weaves between Nora’s Xmas struggles and her memories of her younger, undiagnosed self and all the struggles that now make so much sense to her. These memories force her to face the ways she wasn’t supported as she needed, but also how her behaviours also hurt those closest to her, particularly her best friend Fran.
Might Cry Later flirts with a range of classic text structures including rom-com, bildungsroman and quest, whilst ultimately carving its own path through an inevitably messy world. Nora is both endearing and unlikable to the reader, as she is to herself and it’s a strength of the storytelling that we go on this journey of uncertainty with such confidence.
I found myself rooting for Nora in her everyday work to figure out her life. Her story is a wonderful look into the autistic experience, and part of a growing body of writing exploring the neurodiverse world.
