Joanne Limburg on reclaiming weird

13 May

The Wintering Sessions with Katherine May:
Joanne Limburg on reclaiming weird

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This week, Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

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Listen to the Episode

Katherine May:
I'm walking along the seafront in Margate today. Does it sound different to you, to my normal recordings? It's such a different sea. It's a bigger world, a sea. It's not in an estuary mouth anymore, but of course it's on the sand too. But also, when the tide comes in, in Margate and that's kind of where it is now, it comes right up against the sea wall. No beach at all. I love it, actually. It always feels that bit more powerful and potent around here. And every time I walk down here, I recite that T.S. Eliot line, "On Margate sounds, I can connect nothing with nothing," which is honestly, probably one of the lines of poetry that I've thought about the most, because what does he mean when he says that? Is it positive or negative? Is he talking about feeling empty? Or is he talking about feeling empty, like in a glorious way?

Katherine May:
It comes within The Waste Land, which is this poem that, on one hand, talks about the terrible aftermath of the First World War and the dislocation that people felt. And that covers a lot of what's carried in the meaning of that line, doesn't it? That sense that you might feel emptied out by those experiences. We do know that he came to Margate in order to recover from a fit of nerves, during the sort of run up to writing the poem. But also, The Waste Land covers lots of the ideas from the East that he was reflecting on at the time. He was understanding more about tantra and yoga and some of the spiritual ideas that derive from Buddhism and the Vedic texts. So equally, in context, that line could be talking about the experience of nothingness that is spiritually meaningful and soothing and positive, or maybe both at once. Maybe that's exactly what that whole cycle captures. I love it anyway.

Katherine May:
I'm just pausing so you get a little bit more wave. There's a cormorant sitting out to sea, on one of the posts that mark the height of the tide. I'm just watching him at the moment.

Katherine May:
Anyway, I wanted to introduce you to this week's guest, Joanne Limburg, who's a good friend of mine. But I've been dying to find the right time to invite her onto the podcast, to talk about her book, Letters to My Weird Sisters. I'll let you listen to how we unpack it in the podcast, but I just wanted to talk about how important it is to express our weirdness and our strangeness in the world. I don't think we always get it right, when we talk about people who feel like outsiders. I don't think outsiders are always seeking to be made insiders or to have everybody accepting them even, or feeling the same as them. I think instead, we're often asking for our outsiderishness to be acknowledged and respected, for the periphery to be integrated into our understanding of the world, as a valid place to stand.

Katherine May:
Anyway, it was a great conversation. And after we turned off the recording devices, we carried on chatting for ages, until both of us had to go. I always felt like, I wish that some of my best autistic girl buddies, that's what I call them, we don't call ourselves that, lived nearer by because I kind of feel like we could talk forever, about our shared experience of the world and just spark off each other. Anyway, hope you catch a little bit of that in the podcast recording. I'll see you a bit later.

Katherine May:
Joanne, welcome to The Wintering Sessions. I'm delighted to have you here. It's really good to talk to you, as obviously a fellow autistic woman. But I'm excited that your book, Letters to My Weird Sisters, is about to come out in the US as well, because I just think it's such a landmark book, not just for autistic people to read about autism, as we love to lap up, but really for advancing the understanding of that quality of experience across time. Like asserting how it's always been, rather than, as we so often hear people saying, "Well, there were no autistic children when I was younger," and another.

Joanne Limburg:
There was just that weird kid, but that was disparate.

Katherine May:
Yeah, there was just a kid we threw stones at.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah.

Katherine May:
But also, I think in the way that you assert a commonality, again, through different ways of being a weird sister, as you put it, like an outsider, a different kind of a mind. It's that solidarity that I think is really exciting about your book, because I don't feel that many people have really managed to nail that, and I think you have.

Joanne Limburg:
Oh, good. I'm delighted you think so, because it's all about commonality, community, solidarity and sisterhoods. I just think so much a part of the autistic experience is feeling horribly alone and isolated and that you don't have community. So I think the most important thing to do is to create and foster community, and that isn't just something that you do across space. It's something that you do across time. And as I'm very clear, you don't have to diagnose people posthumously.

Katherine May:
Yes.

Joanne Limburg:
You can look back and say, "Oh, yes. I identify with these women. They had an experience like me. They are my weird sisters." The other thing that was very important to me and it sort of comes in the second letter to Adelheid Bloch, is to include those women who would be seen, who are non-speaking, people who use that kind of language and I don't would call low functioning or people with intellectual disabilities, because they are so often excluded from solidarity. And I think that's dangerous for them and diminishing for the rest of us.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And I think more than that, actually, not only are they excluded and othered and their humanity diminished, but also, somehow they come to be used as a weapon against those of us who are autistic people, who can kind of take part in mainstream society. They're used as a kind of proof that we're not real and that our needs aren't valid.

Joanne Limburg:
Exactly. I think we need to sort of have them with us and say, no, no, we're not the privileged autistics or the clever autistics or, well, whatever you think we are. We're just all autistic and our commonality comes from our shared way of perceiving and being in and experiencing the world. It's nothing to do with what you see or what you judge.

Katherine May:
Yeah. So interesting. Well, let's talk about this word, weird, first of all and your claiming of it. What does it mean to claim being a weird sister? Why is that a useful term to take on?

Joanne Limburg:
Well, I think because it's non-clinical, for a start. It's a term that I've chosen. It's not autistic psychopathology of childhood or whatever they used to call it or Asperger's syndrome or any of that or developmental disorder. It's weird. This is what I am. It's sort of taking back a word like queer or crip and saying, "We're going to own this word and use it." Like I said, it's a very broad word. So you could use it to encompass any idea of neuro divergence or even things that are not seen as neurodivergent. You can take pride in it. Fergus Murray, you may have seen last couple of years, he's set up Weird Pride Day.

Katherine May:
Yes. Yeah.

Joanne Limburg:
So it's a word we can use for ourselves. Hi, I'm a weird sister. I'm a weirdo. Me too.

Katherine May:
Because it is, it's a word that I feel like is so often being used against me and I've overheard it or caught the feel of it. It's one of those states of being, that as I've got older, I've been really glad to have, because I don't want to be the thing that is not weird. That has got no appeal to me at all. And so therefore, maybe weird is actually a really luxurious space to inhabit.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. Yes. It gives you room to be different and not to be easily definable, because it is a word that doesn't have a clear definition. And I kind of rejoice in that.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Actually, I mean, thinking about the first addressee of one of your letters, Virginia Woolf, it kind of captures the state of those clever girls who should know better, who should be able to fit in better, but somehow don't and people wonder why. Is that a lack of will? Is that a deliberate standing at the sidelines? There's something in there for me.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. I was thinking just now, about medicine in general, actually. And how the way it's taught is, here's a problem you can solve. When someone comes with some rumbling, chronic condition or some vague difference, it isn't a problem you can solve. How do you feel towards problems you can't solve? You feel resentment.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah. In fact, the interview I did with Megan O'Rourke, talking about undiagnosable chronic illness, that nevertheless affected every aspect of her life, she said exactly the same thing, that her mainstream doctors wanted to be able to solve the problem. And when they couldn't, she became uninteresting to them, because they didn't have like a modality for working through a problem that they couldn't find a straightforward solution to.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. I've been uninteresting to doctors and uninteresting to psychologists as well, in my time.

Katherine May:
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Psychologists in particular, actually.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. But I think that the Virginia Woolf experience, that sense of exasperation around you, which you probably were familiar with as well. Like, you're such a clever girl, there's nothing apparently wrong with you. Why can't you just go out and be like everyone else and enjoy yourself like everyone else? And then you won't be a perplexity to us, and we won't worry that your life won't be the same shape as everyone else's, which is what we think it should be.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And, why don't you want this? I think that's the phrase that I heard so often... I didn't hear it directly, but that's what I received. Why don't you want this thing enough, that we want you to want?

Joanne Limburg:
Exactly.

Katherine May:
Yeah. So tell us about Virginia Woolf's weird sisterhood, because it seems to me that so many people are really captivated by her. Not necessarily even her writing, but her and her life.

Joanne Limburg:
Well, she was a very singular person. Some of that was intentional, but I think some of that, she just couldn't help. The Virginia Woolf I talk about is the one she talks about in her autobiographical writings, that were written late in her life, but were about her life when she was Virginia Steven, before she became Virginia Woolf, both literally and figuratively. Her mother died, her sister died. Her half-sister and she and Vanessa were left in the house with three men, with their father and their two half-brothers, George and Gerald Duckworth. George was very desperate to sort of make a figure in society. And obviously, the assets you have for that are your beautiful, well-connected half-sisters.

Joanne Limburg:
So, he insisted on Vanessa dressing up and coming out with him. And then when Vanessa threw a strop and wouldn't do it anymore, he turned his attention to Virginia. What was expected of her and Vanessa, actually, is that they would come down beautifully presented in the evening, either go out or receive at home, and that they would be pretty and charming and speak just enough about the right things. Virginia couldn't do either of those things. Virginia had this singularity about her. She also had quite a low income. So it was quite hard to turn herself out in the way that was expected.

Joanne Limburg:
She thought she'd found a brilliant solution, which was to buy some upholstery material, which was cheaper, and have it made up into a dress, which I think is great. It's the kind of thing I'd think to do, which is what really drew me to this story. So, she put it on. She came downstairs to be inspected by George. He looked her up and down and said, "Take that off and burn it." Not only did she not burn it, she described him in very, very, what's the word, derogatory terms years later. So, I think in the end, she won.

Joanne Limburg:
But there's another story she tells, from the same time. He takes her to see Lady someone or the Duchess of someone or the Honourable somebody. And she starts talking very enthusiastically about passion and platonic friendship between men and women, and there's this awkward silence. There's almost this sense of glass is breaking and cutlery being dropped. And afterwards, he says to her, "They're not used to girls saying anything."

Katherine May:
I just related so strongly to those stories.

Joanne Limburg:
Me too. Yeah.

Katherine May:
That sense of like bodily rebellion against wearing the right kind of dress and the incomprehension that there could be a wrong kind of a dress.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. And also the incomprehension that, why wouldn't you want to talk about this really interesting thing?

Katherine May:
Yeah. I still have that incomprehension.

Joanne Limburg:
Why are you looking at me like that? Yeah, I'll always have that.

Katherine May:
But also, those environments that we've all ended up in, where it seems like the rules are designed to catch you out. Like they're not stated, they're not possible to follow and you, of course, come a cropper somehow because how would you not? Yeah. It was so... I guess I didn't really understand that she wasn't a complete insider, right? She always seemed like a insider to that very kind of posh world to me. And I could see suddenly how she wasn't.

Joanne Limburg:
Well, she's a very complex figure. She's just both that well connected, privileged, upper middle-class woman and a woman who was weird and not of her place and in some respects, not of her time.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And also who ultimately the weight of that strangeness in the world overtook her at the end of her life.

Joanne Limburg:
It did. Yes.

Katherine May:
That seems to be what we all most know about her, actually. That's the kind of, I don't know, the sort of iconic gesture.

Joanne Limburg:
Well, we know she was in pain. However privileged you know she was, we know she was in pain because of the way it ended.

Katherine May:
Yeah. I think it's such an image that she created in her own suicide actually.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes.

Katherine May:
She created something enduring that sticks in our imaginations.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. She also wrote very well about awkwardness and I've sort of tried to rescue the character of... I've totally forgotten her name. Doris Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway, who's sometimes just seen as a sort of victim of Virginia's snobbishness. But actually, I think she holds Virginia's sense of awkwardness and humiliation.

Katherine May:
Interesting.

Joanne Limburg:
I think I say, I don't see how she could have written about that from the inside without experiencing it.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah. And I think once you break the assumption that Virginia Woolf is the ultimate insider, you realise how often she's writing about outsiders. I mean Septimus, struggling with what we'd now call PTSD. Her books are full and particularly her stories actually, I think are full of these-

Joanne Limburg:
Oh yes. Like lapping and lapping over and so on. And The Dress, there's a story I didn't have a chance to sort of reference in the book. I referenced it in our talk called The Dress about a woman going to a party and the horror of realizing she's wearing completely the wrong dress. So she experiences herself like a fly in a saucer. The fact that she's wearing the wrong dress makes her feel like a fly that's dying in a saucer.

Katherine May:
I mean, do you ever feel like you're in the right dress because I don't think I've ever left the house and felt like I've worn the right thing, particularly in public.

Joanne Limburg:
Sometimes I do because-

Katherine May:
If you nail it, great.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. But because there's a certain kind of middle class, white Cambridge woman, white stuff and, oh god, well, other brand names that I can dress up as quite easily.

Katherine May:
I see. I can understand. Yeah.

Joanne Limburg:
But I'm aware that it both is and isn't a disguise. As a young woman, I got it wrong constantly. I could not do young womanhood. I do middle-aged Cambridge womanhood quite convincingly, but young womanhood I could not do.

Katherine May:
I was much better at it when I was younger. I used to be really into vintage clothes and like '40s and '50s vintage clothes. That gave me a way to construct something that was historically accurate and therefore completing in and of itself, like it was something I could do and I. You get older and it's... But also, those clothes were really uncomfortable quite often. And it's really interesting to me that I endured that in favour of producing something that was consistent and understandable to me.

Joanne Limburg:
I'm just thinking about clothes as the equivalent of conversation. And sometimes clothes are making a statement and sometimes they're monologuing and sometimes they're saying the same thing as everyone else. And sometimes they're not, and they're not meant to. But sometimes when your clothes aren't saying the same as everyone else's, people don't know what to say to you, just as they don't know what to say to you if you go to a dinner party and start talking about platonic love between men and women.

Katherine May:
It's actually making a lot of the same statements I think.

Joanne Limburg:
It is. It is. Yes.

Katherine May:
But I remember this terrible, terrible moment when I was in the sixth form and I was a school prefect and we had to do all the kind of ushering at the church services and things like that, walk down the hill for... We got a really lovely badge though, which made it all worthwhile for me. I loved the badge. But I remember I'd turned up in this kind of crimplene suit. It was early '60s crimplene suit, dress and matching jacket. I was so pleased with it. I bought it in a charity shop.

Joanne Limburg:
That's sounds lovely.

Katherine May:
It was lovely. Blue crimplene. Perfect, gorgeous.

Joanne Limburg:
Gorgeous.

Katherine May:
Nice little matching handbag. Now, however, I was being really bullied at the time by some girls in that school, they'd been incredibly mean to me. And as I was ushering people into the front row of the annual leaver's church service, one of the girls walked up to me and just whispered in my ear, "That's my Nan's suit. She died a few weeks ago and we donated it to charity."

Joanne Limburg:
Fudge!

Katherine May:
Oh, I love where you said, fudge. Thank you. That doesn't seem very French for our podcast listeners. And I still don't know to this day, whether that was true or not. One of the agonies of that moment was that I couldn't read it like as a-

Joanne Limburg:
But it doesn't matter whether it was true or not. She didn't say it because it was true.

Katherine May:
Oh, it was just freaking mean.

Joanne Limburg:
She said it because she knew it would cause you pain.

Katherine May:
Yeah, absolutely.

Joanne Limburg:
So you got the meaning loud and clear.

Katherine May:
Oh yeah, absolutely. You couldn't miss the meaning, because I was probably one of the poorest kids in that school. One of the meanings it unpacked was that it was evident to her that I was buying clothes from a charity shop and that that was not okay as far as they were concerned.

Joanne Limburg:
You were ahead of your time with that.

Katherine May:
I know. I know. It's so funny. They were all in like Benetton sweatshirts at the time-

Joanne Limburg:
Of course they were.

Katherine May:
Or Calvin Klein or like that was the-

Joanne Limburg:
Was there Kookai when you were at school?

Katherine May:
Yes. I mean, there was all sorts of people with words on their T-shirt, which I never really got.

Joanne Limburg:
I've never understood that. I've never understood why you would want to give free advertising to the place you get your clothes from. But a lot of people seem very... The word that's on their clothes is more important than the clothes. I've never got that.

Katherine May:
The clothes... Because they were always such plain clothes. I couldn't see any appeal to the actual clothes. Anyway, that's just-

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. That's just us not getting it.

Katherine May:
That's just us not getting it. I think that Virginia Woolf moment just really brought that particular thing back to me of not only feeling out of place, but it being pointed out to you in the cruelest possible way, so deliberately.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. I mean my moment with that, which I describe in the book is when I was 14. I still found tights uncomfortable and I was still wearing white knee socks. And then it was made clear to me, not in a remark to my face, but in a remark between people in front of me, and possibly they didn't think I'd even notice, which is worse, that this was funny. That this was a funny thing that was definitive of me. And I was so humiliated.

Katherine May:
That's horrible.

Joanne Limburg:
Because until that point, I'd just been thinking about comfort, I think mostly. I lost my innocence at that point. I thought, oh my goodness. People are looking at my clothes and reading them and judging them. And then there's another bit I talk about where, actually, this is probably the analog of the Virginia Woolf green dress moment. It was a sick form again, you know, the kindest part of a woman's life.

Katherine May:
Why do they let us wear our own clothes in sick form, which is not ready?

Joanne Limburg:
I know, I know. We're just not ready for the politics of it. And I was just walking home behind a pair of other girls and they didn't know I was behind them. I'm absolutely sure they didn't. And one of them was complaining about not getting a boyfriend. And then she said, "I don't know what it is. It's not as if I dress like Joanne Limburg."

Katherine May:
Oh god. Oh my god.

Joanne Limburg:
And it's not that I don't think about clothes. I thought about them a lot and always do. So it's the point where, if I watch the news on television, I get distracted by what the news reader's wearing.

Katherine May:
Yeah. But I mean, I find that I can't quite figure out certain outfits. Like I've never been able to figure out sportswear, for example.

Joanne Limburg:
No.

Katherine May:
But other people wear sportswear and look great in it and look sporty in it. I just look awkward in sportswear, however I wear it, whatever I buy. What is that? How do people understand how to wear these things? I don't know.

Joanne Limburg:
I honestly don't know. I can never get my hair right.

Katherine May:
Right.

Joanne Limburg:
I mean, I pay quite a lot to have it cut and coloured. So I'm reassured that it can't be going below a certain level because the person who does, it's really good and that makes me feel better. But I've got this sort of flyaway, crinkly, Jewish hair, and I'm ashamed of it, partly because of internalised racism, partly because I feel it marks me out as someone who can't woman because I can't get my hair under control. This is not... Back to news readers, news reader hair.

Katherine May:
Yeah. I don't want news reader hair though. Sorry, news readers. But I like my hair to move a little bit more than that, I would say.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. Yeah. But I've really noticed there is a certain way you have to look in order to be in front of a camera. Not that I want to be in front of one. You've got have the right teeth, the right makeup, the right hair, the right dress. You can't-

Katherine May:
Yeah. I never have any of those.

Joanne Limburg:
No. Me neither.

Katherine May:
You brought up your Jewishness and I'd love to talk about the weird sister whose Jewishness was part of the cruelty that was visited on her. Can you tell us a bit about her?

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. This is Adelheid Bloch. It's really a very, very horrible story. Adelheid was born to a prominent Jewish family in Lake Constance in, I can't remember exactly when, but she was about 30 when she died. So 1910s, I think. And then as a small child, she had, what's sometimes called meningitis and what's sometimes called encephalitis and it brain damaged her quite severely. And when she's described, she's described as not having much language and not having much control over her behaviour. And she's an intellectually disabled person and a lot of her symptoms are... And obviously she wasn't autistic. She might have been as well. I don't know. But they are not dissimilar to the traits that autistic people with higher support needs have ascribed to them. So she went as a teenager into an asylum. And then in 1939, something horrible happened in Germany.

Katherine May:
Which we seem to be as a world busy forgetting. But that's-

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. I mean, the other thing we forget is it wasn't kind of an isolated thing that grew up in Germany. They were big on eugenics. And eugenics are a British invention taken up enthusiastically by the Americans and then imported back to Europe. The first people to be sterilised were in America, but there were lots of laws by the time the Nazis came in, in Europe that allowed for the sterilisation of disabled people, people seen as defective. This was not a German invention. So against the background of this, the Nazis come in and all the asylums, the hospitals, the nursing homes are taken over. And basically the place where Adelheid is becomes a kind of research place for looking at degenerative heredity. So they're very interested in all the families of these people. And they're also interested in making sure they don't breed anymore.

Joanne Limburg:
So first they sterilise people and then they move into a phase which was called T4 after the address it was in, in Tiergarten in Berlin. That was where the headquarters were. And this was basically the precursor of the Holocaust. It was the systematic slaughtering of people who were judged as having, and the phrase was "lives unworthy of life." This is what's written on Adelheid's report, "life unworthy of life" and also idiocy. So I thought there's a causal relationship implied between those two. So in this chapter, I sort of explore the history of ideas of idiocy, on imbecility or amentia or whatever horrible name you want to give to it. Yeah. And the emergence of eugenics and what it means to be able to speak as opposed to not speak.

Joanne Limburg:
What happened to poor Adelheid was, she was one of the first people gassed. She was taken to Grafeneck, which was the first killing center for adults. Because they started with children rather horribly, but then they moved on to murdering adults. And she was taken there and she was gassed in the early 1940s. It's the most horrible story.

Katherine May:
It's a horrible story on so many levels. And I'm really interested in your unpacking of the word idiot. It's a word that comes up so often in casual speech. And I don't think we realise the history of it actually.

Joanne Limburg:
I think I've stopped using it, but it's really hard to do because we use it all the time-

Katherine May:
It's really hard to do.

Joanne Limburg:
Without understanding what it means and that it was a word used to push people outside humanity and then physically kill them.

Katherine May:
Yeah. I told my son about it after reading your book and he started campaigning at school against the word idiot.

Joanne Limburg:
Bless him. Oh, that's lovely.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And he has done ever since. Whenever someone uses the word idiot at school, he makes the clear connection between autism and idiot and how, as an autistic person, he would've been labeled that. And therefore would've been seen as unworthy of life. But nevertheless, I think we're all still coming out with it sometimes. It's interesting how we kind of like having that word. It's a dark insight into yourself, isn't it?

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. I thought what is... I mean, you want certainly with many things that are going on at the moment to have a word for something that is ignorant or foolish. Well, I'll say that something's foolish because that, again, the original term was natural fool or whatever. An idiot is he that is a fool natural from his birth. But that seems long ago enough and somehow non-clinical enough to use. That was foolish behaviour. That was a foolish thing to do. That was a foolish policy. That was ill-informed. That was ignorant. I mean, there are lots of things you can call someone. You could say, you absolute plank, for example.

Katherine May:
Actually, there's some really good English ones in particular, I think we'll-

Joanne Limburg:
Like twerp. Just call someone a twerp.

Katherine May:
I mean, you could go for twat as well. Twat is-

Joanne Limburg:
Twat implies some kind of evil intention as well, doesn't it?

Katherine May:
Do you think so? That's interesting.

Joanne Limburg:
Also good. I have a friend, Caron Freeborn who I talk about in the book who used to call me a muppet. "You muppet!"

Katherine May:
Muppet. Yeah.

Joanne Limburg:
And I'm quite happy to confess to being a muppet. It seems accurate. And it can be said affectionately as well.

Katherine May:
Yes. Moppet. I think moppet's a really friendly one.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. And for those of us who have autism, and that takes the form of dyspraxia, it fits pretty well.

Katherine May:
Yes. I sometimes feel like I move a bit like a muppet. Like my whole body's like whoops.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah, me too. Like someone sort of withdrawn their controls and I've gone all over the place.

Katherine May:
Yes, that's right. That's right. I hate it when other people say that about me, but yeah, I'm fully aware that that's also true.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah.

Katherine May:
I'm just interrupting you for a moment to ask if you would consider subscribing to my Patreon. Friends of The wintering Sessions get an extended edition of the podcast a day early, the chance to put questions to my guests, a monthly bonus episode, and exclusive discounts on my courses and events. Most of all, you help to keep the podcast running. To find out more, go to patreon.com/katherinemay. Do take a look. Now back to the show.

Katherine May:
What comes out in your book is something that I guess we know already, but that we maybe forget to state, which is this link between othering and the cruelty, an infliction of suffering. And I thought that about Katharina Kepler as well. Excuse me.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. Because one thing that happens is that social death can often proceed actual death being murdered, being put outside society, being put in an asocial space or a less than human space.

Katherine May:
Kind of outside the walls as it were almost.

Joanne Limburg:
Outside the walls. Yes. And Katharina Kepler was the mother of Johannes Kepler, the early modern astronomer and mathematician, and we'll come to this is what saved her. And she lived in the German town of Leonberg. She lived actually not awfully far away from where Adelheid died. It's a funny thing.

Katherine May:
Yeah. There seems to be almost a connection between the two in your... An implied connection somehow.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. Almost. Yes. She was the oldest woman in town. She'd been on her own ever since her husband deserted her. So in a time where femininity, well, there always are, but there were overtly strict standards of femininity.

Katherine May:
Right.

Joanne Limburg:
You were supposed to speak quietly and as little as possible and be sensitive and emotional and weepy, all the things we now ascribe to white womanhood. That sort of thing. She was not, I mean, she couldn't be because as her son pointed out, she had to take over the business of everything. She had to assert herself in the public realm because there was no one to do it on her behalf. There was no man to be a proxy as was more approved of. And there were also things about her, the way she's described was she was very much not that kind of soft woman. She had opinions. She would state them. If she thought you were wrong, she would correct you. And she was very direct. She was very assertive. She wasn't very aware of, I guess what we now call social cues. So she doesn't seem to have seen if it was not a good time to approach someone, she would just go in there anyway, which I can relate to.

Joanne Limburg:
One of the things that was said about her in court was she doesn't make eye contact with the jury. That's weird. And I thought, uh-huh. And her son said, "Well, my mother doesn't, my mother talks across people and says what she has to say." And I thought, okay, that sounds-

Katherine May:
Interesting.

Joanne Limburg:
Very familiar. And also, this woman had a son who was an astronomer and a mathematician.

Katherine May:
Yep. There's that genetic link that we know about with autism that comes up again. Isn't it?

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. So she wound up being accused of witchcraft and there was a very long drawn-out procedure. She was out of town. She was back in town. She was put in prison in irons. And then, there was a final hearing and it's her son's meticulous notes for this final hearing that we have, which enable us to know who she was and that she had a life and that she existed because she, herself was illiterate as most women were. And he managed just by being utterly meticulous to get the charges thrown out. But this was after years of suffering. She died not long afterwards. She was an elderly woman and the stress-

Katherine May:
She was kept in terrible conditions, wasn't she?

Joanne Limburg:
She was kept in horrible conditions, literally in chains.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And I mean, it says something that this influential man was what it took to get her out of it. And even then it wasn't straightforward.

Joanne Limburg:
No, it wasn't straightforward at all. I mean, it was his exceptional, I think, gifts and his conscientiousness and his determination. And it is very touching story in a way, because he speaks about her sometimes in a very disparaging way. She obviously drove him absolutely up the wall. You can see that, not even between the lines, you can see it in them. But he valued her and loved her enough to take all that time out of his life and devote himself to that. And I think that's the lovely aspect of his story.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And also, what a precise brain can do actually. It's the moments when those incredibly detail-oriented brains come into their own when it's unpicking a case like that.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes.

Katherine May:
It's that chain reaction that I think is so invisible that, when you and I talk about outsidership and how it feels to be socially rejected. Perhaps when we're young, perhaps we are more in the centre of things now.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes.

Katherine May:
But that kind of chain reaction between that and a threat to your life, which actually seems far-fetched, but isn't. Like, we know that at times of war, at times of civil unrest, at times of big social change, that the outsiders are suddenly at huge, huge risk. And it begins [inaudible 00:37:23].

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. Well, tell me about it being Jewish right now.

Katherine May:
Well, exactly that. I mean exactly that. I think, oh, I don't know, that's what we see all over the world as soon as life becomes fidgety.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes. I talk about in the Adelheid book, there's a word necropolitics, the politics of death who gets to live, who gets to die. And sometimes you see them played out very literally as in Nazi Germany. And sometimes you see them played out more insidiously as in only people with underlying conditions died few.

Katherine May:
Well, and quite a vertical. Autistic people at the beginning of the pandemic, when some NHS trusts put blanket, do not resuscitate some or all autistic people.

Joanne Limburg:
Yes, exactly. Yes. And people with intellectual disabilities. Yeah, because we have lives unworthy of life by definition.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And suddenly-

Joanne Limburg:
Oh, it just makes you shudder, doesn't it?

Katherine May:
It does make you shudder, because in an age when we've all been pursuing this identity and it's been so helpful to us to come to that understanding, and we've been seeking out that label.

Joanne Limburg:
And we've found each other.

Katherine May:
And we've found each other and it's been life giving. And so it's been everything to me, it's been survival to me to understand autistic, but it suddenly made me remember how risky it is to also do that. It's not-

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. I mean, I don't always declare myself.

Katherine May:
No.

Joanne Limburg:
I mean, certainly if I go into a medical setting, I don't think it's on my records. I don't know, but I don't always mention it.

Katherine May:
No.

Joanne Limburg:
And that's a shame really.

Katherine May:
Well, yeah.

Joanne Limburg:
I mean, not in the current situation. The current situation, if you're able, sometimes masking is about survival.

Katherine May:
The massive privilege of masking. Honestly, I mean I-

Joanne Limburg:
The massive, massive privilege of masking. But also it means you have to suppress parts of you.

Katherine May:
Completely.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. You can't actually communicate your experience because you're using a language designed not to give away how your experience makes you one of them.

Katherine May:
Absolutely. We are engaged in that dance all the time, every time we need to access some form of help. Whenever I've disclosed, I think I've rarely had a good outcome, except I was telling you, wasn't I, because we talk on WhatsApp sometimes and I was telling you that in my recent visit to Sweden, I went to take part in a podcast and the host said, "Oh, you're autistic. Shall I turn that overhead light off?" I almost whirled up with the consideration because genuinely, I don't think most people would know that fluorescent light is such an issue for loads of autistic people. But also, I wouldn't, I'm so used to just dealing with the fluorescent light. My own home, I have all the lights low, but when I'm out, I get used to just dealing with it and I don't even notice.

Joanne Limburg:
I'm not too bad with light, but I'm very sensitive to noise.

Katherine May:
Right.

Joanne Limburg:
I was in a big dining room yesterday. It was very echoey. And I suddenly realised, I thought, this hurts me. This is hurting my ears to be in this room. And I almost wished I hadn't allowed that into my consciousness because it then became very hard to stay in there. And you realise how much you suppress, how much physical discomfort and emotional discomfort and fear and confusion and pain, you are pushing down all the time and it feels almost dangerous to acknowledge it.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And then you wonder why you're exhausted when you get home and it's because you've been-

Joanne Limburg:
All of that.

Katherine May:
Yeah.

Joanne Limburg:
And although a conscious reading of this, people around you, that you've... I mean, I've done it for so long that it is second nature, but it's still involving an effort in my brain that I assume most people don't have to do. And it's exhausting.

Katherine May:
Yeah. No, absolutely.

Joanne Limburg:
I think of it as, I call it my room dyslexia. Like I can read the room, but it takes me longer. It takes me an effort and I'm tired afterwards.

Katherine May:
Yes. And if it's noisy and if people are standing close to me or it's hot, then I am significantly less likely to be able to actually do that reading, to be honest. And I will spend the next 12 hours replaying it moment by moment in my mind, over and over again to the point of absolute insanity.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. Me too. Yeah.

Katherine May:
We need to begin to think about closing this, but I wanted to ask really about the way that you intertwine your own story with the story of these different women. What did it mean to you to make that deliberate connection and to actually speak to them directly and kind of share your story with them? It feels like an intimate conversation in places, the book.

Joanne Limburg:
Well, I wanted that intimacy. It's a book about connection. It's not a book that's making a psychological assertion about someone. It's a book that's expressing a sense of connection and bringing people into the fold and making your fold bigger. And I didn't want to write about them or I didn't want to write for them. I was especially aware with Adelheid that when you've got someone who's nonspeaking, then the temptation is to speak for them. And actually, maybe I'm being... I mean, don't get me wrong. People advocate wonderfully for their relatives and for their clients who can't speak. There are people doing a wonderful, loving job out there, but what you can't do is speak for that person. So I thought I can speak to you though. And I can give this letter to you as a gift and what you do with it and whether you can do anything is with you, but it's an expression of solidarity. It brings us back to the beginning, I think. And also, I was very influenced, I should say, by a book by Georgina Kleege called Blind Rage. It's a brilliant book. She's a blind American scholar.

Katherine May:
Right.

Joanne Limburg:
Well, among other things, she's legally blind and started to go legally blind as a child. And Blind Rage is a series of letters to Helen Keller. It's partly a biography of Helen Keller. It's partly about Georgina's own experience. It's partly a reckoning with the figure of Helen Keller who is held up as kind of patron saint of deaf-blind people. This is how to be a good disabled.

Katherine May:
Yes. Actually, watching the film about Helen Keller is I think one of my first brushes with, like a discourse about disability as a child. It's an early informational text that goes out there to say like, this is how you should do it.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. And it's given us something to overcome. She wasn't human, now she is-

Katherine May:
Yes. That's so interesting.

Joanne Limburg:
Is the kind of message of the story. I mean, she was actually a very sort of complex figure and far more interesting than the sort of saint that's been created out of her. But Georgina writes to her because she is reckoning with her. And the other thing is, and I think I said this in the Letter to the Reader, which is the only letter to the reader, I was thinking about how, you know what, I'm not masking, I'm not adjusting myself for you. This is not yet another book of me explaining myself to you. Screw that.

Katherine May:
Yes.

Joanne Limburg:
I'm going to have a chat with my friends over here and you can listen, but you can come to where we are.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Which is, again, more liberating than it should be, but definitely liberating.

Joanne Limburg:
I know. I mean, I was thinking analogously of, I was thinking of Beyonce's album Lemonade. And I don't understand all-

Katherine May:
Few people would compare you to Beyonce.

Joanne Limburg:
Well, I wouldn't compare myself to Beyonce. I wish in so many ways. But I was listening to Lemonade and there are bits of it I don't understand, but that's okay because it's not addressed to me. I can listen if I like, and I'm grateful for the privilege of listening, but I have no right to demand that it's completely accessible to me.

Katherine May:
That it's made into a text for you rather than-

Joanne Limburg:
Exactly. It is not a text for me.

Katherine May:
Yeah. And that's so hard, I think culturally. I think that's part of this cultural moment we're in that we're finding very hard is that not everything is for you as the imagined kind of [inaudible 00:45:41].

Joanne Limburg:
Default person.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Which has become the default that the we, the cultural we is the kind of white middle class across loads of different societies.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. And I'm, I mean, and you as well, are in a strange space of both being the cultural we and not being it.

Katherine May:
Yeah.

Joanne Limburg:
So we know both what it's like to not realise that we're centring ourselves. And we also know what it's like to be in different contexts, to not be in the centre, to be the they, instead of the we.

Katherine May:
Yeah, absolutely.

Joanne Limburg:
Because this is how I explain it. I say, who is the we and who is the us here and who is the they? And if someone's the they, like the most vulnerable in our society, they're always the they, you've got a problem.

Katherine May:
Yeah. It's so interesting being invited into the sort of cultural centre having not been in it before, because even then I often come out feeling spoken over about my own experiences. So where I'm asked about my autism, the reply is often telling me back about how I should conceive of it rather than simply absorbing what I have said about it.

Joanne Limburg:
And I think the success of Wintering, I mean, it's a brilliant book, but also a lot of non-autistic people, wider people felt they could identify with it.

Katherine May:
Yes.

Joanne Limburg:
So I'm sure you've thought about this a lot, but then they've got to try and negotiate with the fact that you're like them, but not like them.

Katherine May:
Well, yes and no, because actually I find that a lot of people just skip over that information. I mean, I kind of drop it in, in the first few pages of the book, but I don't go into that.

Joanne Limburg:
That's what I figured they'd do.

Katherine May:
Yeah. We just forget it.

Joanne Limburg:
It's like, we don't really want to think about the implications of that.

Katherine May:
Yes, that's right. Or, of course, I mean, the human mind is profoundly confabulatory. It will make up a story to-

Joanne Limburg:
It is. I mean, what I think I find so impressive about Wintering is, it's something I don't think I could do, which is put myself in a place where most people could identify with me. I'm such a committed weirdo for better or worse. And I don't think it makes you less weird or less autistic or less unique, just somehow you've managed to find a bridge.

Katherine May:
Yeah. But that bridge really surprises me because actually, I feel like I wrote a book about the kind of gloomiest, weirdest part of myself, all the bits that have attracted that comment that we talked about at the beginning before like, why don't you want to be like everyone else? Why do you have to dwell on these things? Why are you obsessed with death? That kind of thing. That book is full of all that stuff, honestly.

Joanne Limburg:
But one thing you realize is that even people who are totally at the centre in a way they don't think about. They also have moments where they think about themselves as outsiders. Or there are always bits of themselves that they have to leave outside the circle because they don't fit in order to... Like when David Bowie died. Now, you can't have that many people who was really that weird and only ever identify with David Bowie. I mean, I'm sorry. But speaking as someone who has always been weird and can't help but be weird, if you can put weird on and off, you're not weird.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. You're weird like a stick of rock all the way through or you're-

Joanne Limburg:
Exactly. Exactly. Or you're cosplaying weird. Yeah.

Katherine May:
I love the idea of cosplaying weird. But in my own world, I don't feel weird at all. I feel like everyone else is weird. So while I always feel like an outsider, I also feel like my centre is the truth, in that very arrogant, human way. Like I find other people's willingness to obey social norms and wanting to be part of a pack and wanting to look the same in those Benetton sweaters or whatever it is, I find that weird. To me that's weird.

Joanne Limburg:
I find it weird too. So I think I've really successfully internalised a lot of shame and fear about not being part of it. So I never feel able to assert most of the time that I'm the one that's got it right. I always know. I always have a sense where you could be wrong, you could be completely wrong. And it's this permanent, I'm never... What's the word? I mean, the phrase that's coming to my head is, I'm never quite in my skin. Maybe that'll do.

Katherine May:
Yeah. You're always conscious of wearing whatever it is you're wearing at that moment.

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. Exactly.

Katherine May:
And how contingent that is on-

Joanne Limburg:
And it might be wrong. You might've put on the wrong face today.

Katherine May:
Thank you, Joanne. That was just such a great conversation about [inaudible 00:50:23].

Joanne Limburg:
Yeah. It's always great to talk to you.

Katherine May:
I know, I know it's lovely to talk. And I could unpack outsidership forever actually, because I think it's this huge and complex experience that-

Joanne Limburg:
And I wouldn't say it's not something everyone experiences because it's contextual. So almost everyone will have experienced it at some point. I think, if there's a bridge, that's the bridge.

Katherine May:
Yeah. That's kind of lovely. Isn't it? That's an optimistic note to end on that maybe you can-

Joanne Limburg:
I think so. It does end on an optimistic note.

Katherine May:
Yeah. Why not?

Joanne Limburg:
We need optimistic notes.

Katherine May:
More optimism. More weirdness, more optimism. Thank you.

Joanne Limburg:
Thank you.

Katherine May:
You brought what we needed today.

Katherine May:
I don't know if it's because I've made it a little bit further along the coast as I've been walking and talking to you or if the sea has genuinely calmed down, but you can hear probably the much more serene quality of the sea at this point on the path. It's just lapping up gently against the sea wall. I always think a lot about the smell of the sea. Loads of people hate it. I love it. I love the smell of the sea. It is, today, intensely green. It's like the smell of the roots of flowers when you pull them out of a case, hopefully before they've gone slimy. Maybe that's why people don't love it. I'm beginning to understand now that this might be my particular thing.

Katherine May:
It's funny, because as I'm walking along here, I'm feeling strange all over again. I'm sort of turning my back from the people who ride past on their bikes because I'm talking into a big furry microphone. It's weird, isn't it? It's a weird thing to do. But so many of the things worth doing are weird and they do make you appear to be weird. I think a lot about how the progress of my life and all the best things that have come to me are from leaning into weirdness rather than trying to hide it. Yeah. I think, Joanne's completely right, that reclaiming weird is our birthright. I hope some of you and all of you felt as relieved by that conversation as I did.

Katherine May:
Do you know what? As I carry on through life, I understand more and more that everybody feels like an outsider in one way or another. I don't know anyone who genuinely feels like an insider, even the people that look like insiders to me. Everyone's always busy identifying their difference and often feeling sort of challenged and victimised by that. And, of course, for loads of people, that victimisation is very real. But I do think it's an interesting exercise to identify the places where our outsidership is to some extent chosen and to some extent, a luxurious space where other people don't have control of us, a rebellious space, a creative space, a generative space. I don't want too much insidership. I like it on the edges here. Just like I like being right on the edge of the sea. I'm walking along a part now where the graffiti artists have taken over. And there's sand up on the path. It feels like this is a liminal space outside of the main constraints of the town. I wouldn't want to be here on my own at night, but here in the daytime, I don't know, it fits.

Katherine May:
I'm wishing you all a good week after you've listened to this. I wanted to say thank you again, to Joanne and to producer, Buddy, who I met with for lunch last week and completely failed to get a photo of us together. He does so much for this podcast. And it was great to see him. Everything happens remotely, doesn't it? We don't get to meet in person. And thank you to Meghan, our convener. I talked about her role last time. And thank you to the Patreons who just showed me the best time last week when we did a live book surgery on Patreon. Had so much fun talking about the books we love and the books we need at this point in time. I spent ages researching it beforehand as well, because I was scared that they would all laugh at me because they're all so knowledgeable. So it was good. It was good for me.

Katherine May:
I'll see you all again really soon. I've got some amazing guests coming up for you. And if you want the chance to feed in questions to them, I'll ask after I've done the main interview, then do join the Patreon. My Patreons are enjoying a really good extended episode this time and you could too. And it really, really helped keep us afloat. Thank you everyone. I'll see you soon. Bye for now.

Show Notes

This week, Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

We talk about:

Reclaiming 'weird'
The shared experience of outsidership and othering
Being Jewish and autistic
Disabled people and the holocaust
Not fitting in at school

Links from this episode:

Joanne's website
Joanne's book Letters To My Weird Sisters

Please consider supporting the podcast by subscribing to my Patreon where you’ll get episodes a day early (and always ad free) along with bonus episodes and more!

To keep up to date with The Wintering Sessions, follow Katherine on Twitter, Instagram and Substack

For information on Katherine’s online writing courses, including her programme Wintering for Writers, visit True Stories Writing School

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