43 pages • 1 hour read
Fern BradyStrong Female Character
Fern BradyNonfiction | Autobiography / Memoir | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Summary
Background
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Key Figures
Themes
Index of Terms
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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BetaChapters 10-14Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 10 Summary
Increasingly repulsed by the men she dances for at work, Fern becomes briefly convinced that she is only attracted to women. During this period, she exclusively dates women but finds that “I didn’t fit in on the gay scene either, where everyone seemed to already be friends and I felt like I’d missed out on some big initial meeting” (217). As school and work overwhelm her, her love life becomes increasingly peripheral. After beginning to date men again, she starts going out with a man named Josh, who she does not have very strong feelings about. During her summer job writing reviews for a local arts magazine, she is assigned to try standup and write about her experience. Despite being incredibly nervous about the assignment, she discovers that performing comedy is exhilarating and knows that she wants to try to build a comedy career. Josh does not think this is a good idea.
In the final year of university, Fern is made editor of the student newspaper, making it even more difficult for her to balance stripping with other responsibilities. If she cannot continue to make money, however, she will be forced to drop out of school. Desperate for the financial aid office to finally recognize her plight and give her the money she was promised, she takes all the evidence she can find to them, and they unexpectedly give her the money she needs. Overnight, Fern is able to quit stripping and focus exclusively on her life as a student.
Chapter 11 Summary
Fern graduates and breaks up with Josh, but she remains friends with some of their shared acquaintances. These women come from upper-class families and are consistently passive-aggressive towards Fern about her eating habits. During an excursion to one of their family’s beach houses, she learns that Josh has started dating Millie, another “posh” girl who she dislikes strongly. Her body has an extreme grief response to this revelation, with her skin breaking out into sores. At a party for the magazine she and Josh both worked for, she comes face-to-face with both of them and has to hold herself back from starting a physical fight with Millie. She and Lauren leave the party early. The next week, she begins doing comedy gigs and immediately finds the men on the Scottish circuit hostile to her presence. Despite this, she feels very comfortable in the comedy space.
Chapter 12 Summary
In 2010, Fern moves to Manchester to focus exclusively on her pursuit of a stand-up career. While there, she works an administrative day job. She struggles to navigate the professional social conventions there and is sensorily triggered by the eating habits of coworkers. After being discovered kicking the stall doors in the women’s bathroom to cope with overwhelm, she is fired.
Her mother continues to be unsupportive of her comedy career, even when she reaches the finals of the So You Think You’re Funny? competition. After being casted on several panel comedy shows, she realizes she is not being asked back for second appearances because of behaving in ways that, unbeknownst to her, put off producers. Amidst this professional stress, she becomes reliant on Xanax to feel relaxed. When her new partner Conor refuses to give her the pills, she responds irately. She begins dieting in order to be skinny enough that producers will invite her back to their shows, writing “I wished I could go back to being fat and happy but it was simple social economics—I didn’t have the social currency to be fat. I wasn’t likeable” (253).
Chapter 13 Summary
At the time of writing, Fern is still struggling to discuss meltdowns openly with others. She explains that many allistic people do not understand what an autistic meltdown is, specifically that they are physically uncontrollable. Because of her late diagnosis, Fern has not trained herself to recognize the early signs of a meltdown and avoid them. Instead, she has spent a lifetime developing “maladaptive coping mechanisms” (259). She runs through the experience of having a meltdown triggered by her nails being cut too short, writing about how it impacts her daily life down to the minutest details, and asks readers to consider what it would be like to experience this without being able to talk about it.
Deconstructing and remedying this way of existing is an ongoing process for her that takes an immense amount of work. In 2020, she begins tracking her meltdowns meticulously to determine what things consistently cause them. The same year, she has a very positive experience working on the popular gameshow Taskmaster, which she finds to be “the most autism-friendly job I’d ever had” (275), because there was no pressure on set to mask. As she learns to live more openly as a person with autism, achieving a higher sense of calm, her meltdowns reduce. However, she remains disappointed that medical professionals could not provide her the support she needed earlier in life.
Chapter 14 Summary
Fern realizes that she needs to find a way to forgive her mother for all her parental shortcomings. The diagnosis changes how she views her mother, and for the first time, she considers how difficult it must have been to parent an undiagnosed child. She also recognizes all the ways in which her mother tried to support her during childhood, most notably encouraging her to focus on languages. After having lunch with her mother to talk about these things, Fern comes home to Conor and cries about how overwhelmed she is by the positive experience. This, she writes, “is the closest I can get to an uplifting conclusion,” and ends the book on a note of acceptance about her diagnosis (283).
Chapters 10-14 Analysis
The final five chapters of Strong Female Character mark the first period of consistently positive change in Fern’s life, which has previously been characterized by confusion, exclusion, and pain. Her career, love life, and mental and physical well-being all improve significantly after getting out of university and eventually receiving a diagnosis. After the conflict-ridden central chapters of the memoir, this final phase represents a gradual move toward resolution—though Fern recognizes that that resolution is ultimately imperfect.
The moment that catalyzes this major positive shift in Fern’s life is, arguably, the university’s last-minute decision to give her appropriate financial aid. She quips, “Overnight I was given four years’ worth of grants. I was stunned into silence. I could quit stripping. When I woke up after the best sleep of my life, I realized that those people who say money isn’t everything are liars” (224-25). The simplicity of this moment and its immediate positive impact highlight the financial component of her struggles as essential. Once financially comfortable, Fern finally has the mental space to begin trying to live the kind of life she had previously dreamed of: “After quitting stripping and getting my student grant, I had a much more stereotypical student life” (228). As she quickly discovers, however, this financial relief does not alleviate her social or medical difficulties; the breakup with Josh reveals the hostility of the girls in her cohort and triggers another period of poor emotional health for her.
It is only after Fern receives her diagnosis that she is able to address her mental health struggles head-on. This is a turning point that she achieves with the help of her boyfriend Conor, who provides the kind of support that she has needed for her entire life. After the diagnosis, Conor remains supportive, as Fern describes his involvement in her ongoing mental health journey. Recalling a particularly positive stretch of time, she writes, “Sure enough, the meltdowns subsided. I barely noticed until Conor texted me one day: ‘You’ve been really good lately. I’m proud of you.’” (269). This moment demonstrates the importance of both the diagnosis itself and Conor’s kindness about it, which contrasts starkly with the hostility that Fern always experienced from family members. Even those hostile family members, however, are reassessed in light of the diagnosis. In particular, her mother is somebody she begins to see in an entirely new way: “For the first time, I thought about having a baby that cried when you tried to cuddle her, a toddler that scowled when you talked to her and scratched her arms when you touched her” (282). Fern’s newfound sympathy does not release her mother of any accountability for the trauma of Fern’s childhood, but it softens her parental shortcomings to ones made out of ignorance rather than malice. In this sense, the diagnosis is not only an opportunity for Fern to make improvements to her life, but for her family to change for the better as well.
Still, this plethora of improvements is not a perfect resolution. While wrapping up the final chapter of the memoir, Fern comments, “It’s uncomfortable that this isn’t all good or all bad or a happy ending or a sad ending, but just a mess that everyone muddled through” (283). Her feelings about her mother, for example, are still unresolved. So is her relationship to her own autism, which she anticipates is something she will have to continue negotiating for the rest of her life:
Soon it’ll be menopause and the disruption to my hormones will send my oversensitive system madder than normal, just like any chemicals or drugs do. Then the increasing illness of middle age will mean navigating the minefield of dealing with doctors who misinterpret and misread autistic pain. After that I’ll likely have to deal with being a neurodivergent person in an old folks’ home that’s been designed exclusively with neurotypical needs in mind and the exclusion and social problems will mean it’ll be like school all over again (284).
The “mess” that her late diagnosis has left Fern with is extensive and deeply complex. Now that she has words to describe what has happened and will continue to happen to her, though, she can navigate her environment with more agency and an informed perspective. In Strong Female Character, clarity functions as its own form of resolution, demonstrating that in matters of mental well-being, self-awareness can be a key first step to attaining a better quality of life.
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