By Jess Wilkinson

As a woman who was diagnosed as autistic in adulthood, looking back on my extreme attachment to Jacqueline Wilson’s novels has taken on a new meaning.

Jacqueline Wilson recently announced a new instalment in her Girls series. With that announcement memories of picking up Double Act for the first time from my school library, and becoming obsessed in mere pages, were unlocked. I tore my way through her books at a remarkable pace, absorbed by the lives of these fictional girls.

I found myself thinking about her books properly for the first time in years. My favourites included Cookie, Candyfloss, Bad Girls, and My Sister Jodie. I would re-read them to the point that my mum would ask why I didn’t read anything new. I would ramble on to anyone who would listen about her books, whether I was trying to argue a point about a character or just telling them the plot chapter by chapter. I made it my life’s mission to read everything she wrote.

(Not to get ahead of myself, but the signs were all there. Jacqueline Wilson was arguably my first special interest.)

Like many girls from my generation who grew up reading in lieu of making friends, I saw myself in those books. Particularly in the main characters: girls who were quiet, shy and lonely, yet bright, creative and thoughtful. Girls who struggled socially yet thrived in the complex world of their imaginations. Girls who were quirky, who often did things that others didn’t understand, who had hobbies and interests that weren’t like other kids. These girls were ‘different’ to other girls their age. I myself was ‘different’.

I didn’t have any proper friends. A few older kids thought I was ‘cute’ and included me, but I was a fun little project to them rather than a true friend. I didn’t tend to play with other kids at break times; I preferred to sit alone and read. I didn’t talk much, but once you got me going, I could natter on about the strangest topics. I didn’t ‘get’ maths, and I was awful at P.E. I couldn’t tell the time until embarrassingly late. There were so many things that identified me as an outlier, things I couldn’t explain, things that my parents and teachers put down to shyness.

My mum and I decided to investigate the reason for my ‘shyness’ when I was a little older. Having been through multiple rounds of counselling and CBT between the ages of 16 and 19, autism had been brought up in conversation once or twice when I spoke about not knowing what to do or say in social situations and feeling hyper-aware of my body language and facial expressions. Of course, my counsellors and my parents had all believed that this was down to anxiety and/or social awkwardness.

When I discovered that a friend I had grown up with who lived a few hours away was autistic, I started considering autism properly. I hadn’t seen this friend all the time growing up, so I suppose I hadn’t had the chance to see what she was like on a daily basis. But we had always got along so well; we had the same interests, the same humour, even the same way of speaking. When my mum told me this friend was autistic, I was a little surprised, but then it made sense. And then it started to make sense for myself.  

However, the first time I was assessed, I was told I was, in fact, not autistic. But women and girls generally mask their autistic traits better than men. This is largely due to social expectations of women forcing them to act a certain way; little boys are generally given more passes than little girls in terms of politeness, probably because of the ‘boys being boys’ agenda. Plus, many diagnostic models for autism are based on surveys taken from male participants (see this article from the Child Mind Institute). Thus, many girls do not fit the criteria and tend to slip through the system.

To cut a long story short, my mum found a private practice that specialises in autism in girls as well as boys, and I was diagnosed with autism at the ripe age of 20. I was very fortunate to have this avenue to get diagnosed. If I hadn’t been able to go private, I might have gone on for years with no answers. A small piece of good news is that the NHS is working on improving the autism assessment process to be more inclusive to all genders, ages, backgrounds, ethnicities... Hopefully, these improvements will lead to more people getting the diagnoses they need earlier in life.

After a short grieving period of feeling like I had to rediscover and reassess myself, I felt free. I was on the path to understanding myself properly. I found myself looking back at my childhood, at my fixation on Greek and Egyptian mythology, at my vivid imagination and closed-off attitude to other kids. And, of course, at my endless reading, particularly of Jacqueline Wilson.

The characters in her books and my attachment to them took on a whole new meaning. Beauty from Cookie didn’t have ‘any proper friends’, was a ‘joy to teach’, had a special interest in rabbits, and took refuge in her imagination when bullying got to be too much. Another book I loved was Midnight. Violet, the main character, fixated on fairies in order to escape her home life. Pearl from My Sister Jodie was a shy bookworm and relied on Jodie socially. Mandy from Bad Girls is taken under Tanya’s wing, and Mandy begins to reflect Tanya’s characteristics as she rebels against her overbearing mum. I could go on and on.

These characters are never explicitly described as autistic and perhaps aren’t neurodivergent at all. But regardless, I still felt this strong connection with them. While Jacqueline Wilson may not have intended these characters to be neurodivergent, she clearly intended for them to appeal to a demographic of young girls who were, in some way, different. That’s what her characters were to me, at least.

I think reassessing your relationship with your childhood obsessions is a common experience for women like me, especially for those who grew up reading Jacqueline Wilson and felt such a strong alliance with the quirky, smart and unique female characters. My diagnosis has helped me to understand myself to a whole new degree, as is the case with many autistic women getting late diagnoses.

I have learned not to work against my differences, but to work with them instead. I also learned that my favourite childhood author meant far more to me than I had ever realised. I hope Jacqueline Wilson knows how important she was to all those ‘different’ little girls, regardless of whether they were undiagnosed autistic or not. She made us all feel seen. She made me feel seen.