Girl Unmasked: A Review

The first book I've read in full in a while... is it any good?

One of the things that I did back in my grade school days was read. Apart from the stuff that we would read in English class (some works that come to mind are Life of Pi, Heart of Darkness, some plays of Shakespeare, etc.) I would read books for leisure. Most of them were non-fiction, as I was (and still am) interested in science and physics¹.

This changed once I got to college. The increased workload from my courses took away the time I had to read anything other than college textbooks, assigned reading from the Honors colloquium and seminar, or research articles that my research advisor would give me, or I found by scouring InspireHEP or the ArXiv.

Fast forward to recent times. With the PhD on hold and with me being launched headlong into disabilities, autism, and self-advocacy thanks to my work with Niagara County, it was imperative that I should start to read accounts of other people’s experiences, along with other books that tickle my fancy. This led to me getting a library card, as well as starting a book collection. One of the books I acquired was Girl Unmasked, a memoir written by Emily Katy, an Autistic woman.

The front cover of Girl Unmasked by Emily Katy (picture taken 7/6/2024)

After a few author notes, including one on lists (I’ll speak more about lists in a bit), Emily proceeds with a brief introduction, stating the purpose of the book.

A short prologue follows the introduction, describing an escape from the anxiety that school provided her. She is quite vivid in her account, intensely describing the feelings coursing through her.

After this prologue, Emily spends seventeen chapters going through her early life, starting from her childhood all the way to close to the current day. In these chapters, she goes through a lot. Most of her account describe how she attempted to fit in with the world, which is built around the majority neurotype, while being undiagnosed. This worked decently well early on, but the loss of her grandfather would shake her (not unlike what the loss of my stepfather did to me).

From this point, other symptoms would settle in, such as anxiety, self-harm, and obsessive behaviors to try to contain the anxiety (which later lead to a diagnosis of OCD). Eventually the buildup of all of these, along with the pressures of the British school system, led to an attempt on her life, which led her to being sent to a psych unit for evaluation.

Emily describes the experience inside the psych unit very well. She questions inside of the unit whether she is autistic (the staff there state she’s not, although their notes (or at least the exerpt of the notes we see in the book) very strongly suggest she is). Shortly after she left the unit, Emily finally gets the diagnosis of autism, which explains basically everything she had experienced up to this point (later, ADHD would be added). Although she wasn’t exactly out of the woods yet, she now understood herself better. She was then able to get through the rest of school and university, and to become a nurse in the same system that treated her.

Throughout the book, Emily peppers in lists that are related to the topic that she is discussing at that point. She does warn us in the beginning that there may be a lot of lists². I do like the inclusion of them. They act to organize ideas together, and they help to break up the monotony of walls of text³. There are some lists that really stand out to me. These are:

• Emily’s list of ‘special’ interests.

• Examples of “autistic masking”. In this she mentions the idea of scripting, or learning a script to deal with certain social situations. I’ve presented my interpretation of the internal workings of scripting here.

• Reasons why I could/can’t be autistic. Yes, this references two lists at once. But they are very closely linked, so I put them in one point. The discussion between the lists is very important, and highlights a very big thing that’s wrong in our system. Autistics (and really, any disabled person) have to continously prove they are disabled in order to get the stuff they need, and if we can’t, we are denied. Without certain accomodations, or supports, people can reach a point of crisis, which Emily has described in the book. Also, often times it is not until crisis is reached that a diagnosis comes out.⁴

• The Resource List to Counteract Any Need For Support. Not a complete list by any means, but certainly a good start, especially for those starting to explore the vast world of autism and neurodivergence. Additional resources can be found, for instance, on Emily’s Instagram, the Stimpunks Foundation or the Autism Books by Autistic Authors Project.

In each chapter, Emily does digress from the story of her life to make references to the literature on autism, which add some additional perspective on her story, and the vast number of stories that have yet to be told from other autistic individuals.

This leads to my only issue with regards to the book (although it’s less of an issue with the book itself than the fact that there is a hole in coverage). The author is from the United Kingdom, and as such, we get a good understanding on how their system works. However, such an account seems to be lacking from the United States. It would be interesting to see someone write such an account. Then we could have a comparison between the two countries.⁵

That aside - Girl Unmasked is a great read and gives a great account of how autism can manifest itself. The lists also give me some ideas on future content here on the Muse…

You can purchase the book through Amazon here.

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Have you read this book? What are your thoughts? Let me know in the comments!

1. There were a few fiction books that I did read, or my mother read to me, such as the Geronimo Stilton series.

2. 36, if you are wondering.

3. I will admit, oftentimes I will lose my place on the page when there are just walls of text!

4. NeuroDivergent Rebel describes this in some detail. In particular there is one criterion listed in the DSM-5 for autism:

Symptoms cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning. - Criterion D, CDC

This suggests that autism can only be diagnosed if the person in question is struggling and causing issues in work, school, or social life.

Even when this criterion is met the diagnosis given may be incorrect. Assessment methods are largely based on research on autistic cisgender males and as such may incorrectly diagnose women. As seen in Chapter 11 of the book, Emily was given a diagnosis of Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Obsessive-Compulsive Personality Disorder - which was incorrect.

5. The closest I’ve been able to find is an account from Canada: Paige Layle’s But Everyone Feels This Way (which is on my ever growing list of books to read). Leave a comment if you are aware of an US author that describes their experience in the same sort of vein as described in Emily’s book.