Jen Ferguson’s latest YA novel, Like Glass (Heartdrum, out now), follows teen Tatum, a white and Métis neurodivergent teen. For Ferguson, who is neurodivergent, writing about a character who shared this quality was a new opportunity. Here, Ferguson reflects on her own journey in learning about her neurodivergence and writing with compassion for herself and her characters.
Covid-19 is tied into my publishing life in dramatic ways. I was in Las Vegas, with my family, on a rare and strange vacation that was mostly designed to cater to my elderly grandpa having a great week with the penny slots. But also, my five-year-old nephew Link was there, too. It was 120 degrees in the shade, or something ridiculous. While at an uncharacteristic fancy-for-us dinner at the revolving restaurant at the STRAT Hotel, I got an email from my now-agent Patricia Nelson. She wanted to talk about representing The Summer of Bitter and Sweet. Less than a week later, the world shut down.
Covid-19 is also tied into my personal life in dramatic ways. In the years since that phone call, between Covid isolation where I lived and worked in Los Angeles in a 500-square foot studio apartment, and The Summer of Bitter and Sweet landing in the world, something happened to me. I fell apart. I stopped being able to do things I once used to do so well. I didn’t want to move or talk or think. Everything was too rough for my skin, and the constant hum of Southern California’s ubiquitous leaf blowers made me furious. It was obvious. My depression was back. Eventually, I called a doctor and filled a script for fluoxetine.
My new therapist, Bekah, sits cross-legged in her comfy beige armchair. “It’s possible you have depression, too,” she says, in her animated, enthusiastic way, when I tell her about what I did the last few times I felt this bad. “But here’s the thing, autism and autistic burnout cause depression.”
I’m sitting on a therapist’s couch trying not to become a cliché while moments in my life start to make sense in a whole-body-rush-of-blood. I stare at the books on the shelf above Bekah’s head. “Both things can be true at the same time,” I say, slowly.
Letting it sink in, I feel better. And also, I feel worse. Funny how that works.
I started therapy with Bekah six weeks before Like Glass, my fourth YA novel, hit the shelves. In Like Glass, Tate, a Métis and white teenager who is neurodiverse but isn’t specifically labeled, is dealing with grief and figuring out how to be herself in a world that keeps telling her she’s weird.
This is the first time I’ve written a main character who is neurodiverse like me. How terrifying. And yet, writing Tate’s story is also how I’ve navigated exploring my own identity. Covid made one thing very clear: When the rules in society and all the pieces structuring our society were reformed overnight, suddenly the things I’d been doing to exist didn’t make any sense. During the lockdown, I didn’t have to emotionally mask. Of course, at the time, I didn’t know what I was doing was masking. I thought everyone watched themselves on the Zoom screen to make sure they were making the right faces, and appreciated social distancing and medical facemask ordinances.
What I love about Tate, and what I loved about writing Tate, is how she’s existing in her world: Tate is trying not to mask in her life—she’s trying to exist comfortably in her own skin. She’s not worried about labeling herself or seeking a diagnosis. Tate is Tate and she loves herself. And honestly, that’s part of why she’s running into problems with her parents, her art teacher, and her grief. Tate loves herself—but the neurotypical world isn’t built for people like Tate.
I didn’t think I was ever going to tell anyone that I was neurodiverse. I’ve been doing all the work to present as a neurotypical for four decades. Honestly, I’m tired. Saying this out loud is good for me.
But here’s the other thing: The machinery—the gatekeepers and internet thinkers—around diverse books and #ownvoices and representation-is-wrong-if-it’s-not-my-personal-experience expect authors to come out, to tell the world their private lives and private business to justify writing characters who hold marginalizations that we share.
For me, there’s an uncomfortable tension in writing this essay.
What I can say for sure is that my characters are always the best of me and the worst of me and something else, whatever magic fiction allows. I write books that invite us to explore our complicated parts, and to know in the end that it’s about living in balance with those complications, not solving them. In therapy, I’m learning how to exist as an autistic person in this world, how to exist more softly, how to be more like Tate. In some ways, Covid was a gift to me. And also, Covid was awful: evidence of the many ways we do not care for each other well in this world.
Both things can be true.
