7 Books by Autistic Authors to Pick Up This Autism Acceptance Month
April is Autism Acceptance Month! You can learn more about it, as well as find a lot of great resources about autism, at the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network, including their Autism Acceptance Month website. It’s important when seeking out representation or educational material about autism to research depictions by autistic people themselves. Today, I wanted to highlight some books by autistic authors to pick up this Autism Acceptance Month. Many of these also have autistic main characters, but not all of them.
Several of these books also are relevant to 2024 Read Harder Challenge tasks, including tasks #2 and #19. Many of them also count for task #12: “Read a genre book (SFF, horror, mystery, romance) by a disabled author.” The question of whether autism is a disability or not is a thorny one: most legal and insurance definitions include it, and many autistic people agree (including the ASAN, which describes itself as a disability rights movement), but not all autistic people identify as disabled.
This is only a small sample of the many excellent books by autistic authors worth reading! You can find more at this very helpful website: The Autism Books by Autistic Authors Project. You can browse by genre or age category, and it also has a list of upcoming releases!
Here are just a few books by autistic authors to read for Autism Acceptance Month — and all year.
Strong Female Character by Fern Brady
Most of the books on this list are fiction, but here’s a memoir about an autistic woman who, despite identifying as autistic as a teen, wasn’t able to get diagnosed until her mid-thirties. She talks about the difficulty of growing up neurodivergent without accommodations or understanding from the people around her, including the destructive coping mechanisms she used to get by. Brady is a comedian, so she tells even the difficult parts of this journey with a sense of humor, leading up to her breakout appearance on Taskmaster.
The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean
Devon is a book eater: she sustains herself by absorbing books, not food. But when her son is born a mind eater, she has to go on the run from The Family, who would make him a weapon. She’s looking for treatment to keep him from having to kill to survive, but finding the person who invented these pills would be hard enough without also having to evade The Family. This doesn’t have an autistic main character, but the author is autistic.
Camp Damascus by Chuck Tingle
Chuck Tingle is the queer autistic hero we don’t deserve but deeply appreciate. This is his debut horror novel — you likely recognize his name from his erotic “tinglers.” Camp Damascus stars Rose, a queer autistic teen who is sent to a conversion camp after developing feelings for a female friend. This is already a horrific setting, but then Rose starts to vomit up insects and starts to see glimpses of a demon. Camp Damascus boasts of having a 100% success rate, and Rose is beginning to understand how…
Act Your Age, Eve Brown by Talia Hibbert
This is one of my favorite romance novels I’ve ever read. It is not an exaggeration to say I was swooning while listening to the audiobook — no, seriously, I had to lie on the floor for a minute. It was very Victorian of me. This is book three of the Eve Sisters trilogy, but it can be read on its own. It follows Eve, whose family believes she can’t take care of herself. She’s determined to prove them wrong, so she applies to be a Bed and Breakfast chef. Autistic B&B owner Jacob tells her that she has no experience, so that will be a no…and then she accidentally hits him with her car and breaks his arm. Now he needs to let her help! The two grow closer despite this meet-ugly, and it’s nice to read a romance where both the main characters are autistic!
Something More by Jackie Khalilieh
Jessie is a 15-year-old Palestinian Canadian who is about to start high school and has just been diagnosed with autism. She’s determined to get a fresh start in her new school, and she has plenty of plans, like hiding her diagnosis, perfecting her eyebrows, getting a role in the school play, and having her first kiss. One thing not in her plans: falling for two guys at once.
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White
Silas is an autistic trans teenager in 1800s London, and he’s supposed to enter into an arranged marriage in order to have a bunch of violet-eyed sons — people with purple eyes, like Silas, can communicate with spirits. Silas would rather pluck his own eyes out. He wants to be a surgeon, and he attempts to find a way to gain access to a surgeon’s education — only to be found out and tossed into Braxton’s Finishing School and Sanitorium. Not only is Braxton’s misogynistic, transphobic, and ableist — it’s also killing its charges, according to a spirit who contacts Silas. Now he’ll have to try to take it down before he becomes its next victim. This is a bloody, gory YA horror novel — I loved it!
Izzy at the End of the World by K.A. Reynolds
One night, 14-year-old autistic kid Izzy sees a flash of light over the mountains…and everyone except her and her dog, Akka, disappears. Dealing with her mother’s death was hard enough: Izzy can’t lose anyone else. So she and Akka set off to fight monsters and solve riddles to try to figure out what happened and how to get everyone back.
Do you have a favorite book by an autistic author that I missed? Share it in the comments!
Check out all the previous 2024 Read Harder posts here!
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