You might regret asking 🤣
the thesis began as an exploration of the depiction of mothers/motherhood in crime fiction (most negative male behaviours, dysfunction and even psychopathy is essentially set up to blame the mother, even if she died in childbirth, a serial killer’s conduct will be blamed on her absence) [pick a crime novel, any novel, I dare you not to see it]
this evolved to explore the representation of mothers where the dynamic was in some way atypical, focusing on autism/ND; essentially there are no novels exploring this (the curious incident, mum abandons ASD boy and he is raised by dad)
then: is it okay to attribute autism to characters where it was not explicitly intended (Sherlock, Poirot, etc are retrospectively co-opted into the autistic lit canon, when ASD as we understand it was not when those characters were created and we have no idea whether they are based on people in the authors’ lives who MAY, if alive now, have been diagnosed. Is attributing autistic traits any different to, say, self ID as an ND (controversial now)… or is there an ethical issue over the appropriation and attribution of autism/ND
… there’s more …
then it evolved into looking at whether autism is authentically presented - in the curious incident, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo etc the authors did ZERO research into autism, were not autistic, had no autistic family members but expressly created autistic characters
in the case of the latter, the only female representation of autism in fiction, what does this say about the misrepresentation and the misunderstanding of female autism given the male centric research history and bias within the design of diagnostic protocols?
and then, I ended up looking at late diagnosed women (often mothers, you see) and how the understanding formative life experiences, relationships and their motherhood, can shift with a diagnosis of autism.
Ta da!
and the book…
is a domestic noir about 4 generations of women: three mothers, one tho failed to protect her daughter from abuse; one who abandoned her child as an infant; one who is raising an autistic daughter filled with grief for the life and the child she thought she was meant to have. When the first dies, the second is asked to return, and the third (Mum 3 is the main character) is left to deal with the unravelling of the secrets of her mother and the grandmother who raised her when a body is uncovered in the foundations of the family home. Murder, mayhem, gaslighting and toxic relationships abound… but mum 3 begins her motherhood journey feeling trapped by the obligations of her autistic daughter only to be saved by her at the end…