A Little Less Broken
How an Autism Diagnosis Finally Made Me Whole
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4.8 • 4 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“An inspiring memoir about coming home to who you are.” —People Magazine
One woman’s decades-long journey to a diagnosis of autism, and the barriers that keep too many neurodivergent people from knowing their true selves
Marian Schembari was thirty-four years old when she learned she was autistic. By then, she’d spent decades hiding her tics and shutting down in public, wondering why she couldn’t just act like everyone else. Therapists told her she had Tourette’s syndrome, obsessive-compulsive disorder, sensory processing disorder, social anxiety, and recurrent depression. They prescribed breathing techniques and gratitude journaling. Nothing helped.
It wasn’t until years later that she finally learned the truth: she wasn’t weird or deficient or moody or sensitive or broken. She was autistic.
Today, more people than ever are diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. Testing improvements have made it easier to identify neurodivergence, especially among women and girls who spent decades dismissed by everyone from parents to doctors, and misled by gender-biased research. A diagnosis can end the cycle of shame and invisibility, but only if it can be found.
In this deeply personal and researched memoir, Schembari’s journey takes her from the mountains of New Zealand to the tech offices of San Francisco, from her first love to her first child, all with unflinching honesty and good humor.
A Little Less Broken breaks down the barriers that leave women in the dark about their own bodies, and reveals what it truly means to embrace our differences.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Essayist Schembari shares her experience of neurodivergence in this affecting debut. In the narrative's opening pages, a 34-year-old Schembari receives an autism diagnosis from her doctor, which she takes as confirmation that she "was not lazy or weird or deficient or annoying... or broken." From there, Schembari flashes back to her childhood, recounting the difficulty she had connecting with her peers and her frequent clashes with teachers and school administrators. As she entered adulthood, Schembari adapted by "suppressing my natural instincts and replacing them with learned, often rehearsed, behaviors." That strategy allowed her to blend in, even as it took a toll on her mental health. She fortifies lyrical descriptions of her own loneliness with rattling statistics—noting, for instance, that autistic people are nine times more like to die by suicide than their neurotypical peers. Such facts are galvanizing, but the memoir's greatest strength lies in Schembari's forceful prose and remarkable candor as she charts her path from self-hate to happiness. The results are stirring.
