New book gives insight into inner life of an autistic teenage girl

Freya Harte is not a Puzzle

By Méabh Collins O’Brien Press €9.99

A GAELTACHT trip, one of the rites of passage for many Irish teenagers, usually means craic, comhrá, and céilithe. Often their first extended stay away from home, it offers exciting opportunities for new friendships, perhaps even a hint of romance.

Freya Harte, however, is filled with anxiety at the very thought of the experience, over who her room-mates will be, and how she will summon the communication skills necessary for social survival.

Surviving the daily pressures of secondary school is already testing Freya to the limit, let alone having to spend her mid-term holiday with the same peers who have begun to shun her and keep their distance from a person seen as ‘different’.

“Why was it that, no matter how hard I tried, I always managed to stand out in a million terrible ways at school?” Freya wonders.

“I was always forgetting things and arriving late to class, and teachers were constantly giving out to me for not paying attention and even being rude.

I had no idea how to make new friends, and even when I tried copying the other girls, I still got it wrong.

To get through the Gaeltacht experience requires an immense amount of forward planning on Freya’s part. Every topic of conversation must be thought through in advance, every social scenario prepared for.

She even draws up a list of “Things I will be in Irish college”, which includes being friendly and agreeing with everything her room-mates say, letting the others take their pick of the beds and use the shower first.

Her list of “Things I will not be” includes avoiding being “annoying, slow, weird, embarrassing, and autistic”. Because despite having recently received an autism diagnosis, Freya is struggling to see how that term could possibly apply to her.

Even though the diagnosis has answered a lot of questions for her parents about Freya’s behaviour and encouraged at least some of her teachers to offer her support and understanding, all Freya is concerned about right now is convincing her classmates that she is ‘normal’.

The word ‘normal’ is one she later comes to firmly reject as she learns more about autism, but for the moment Freya’s Gaeltacht trip is less about having fun while improving her Irish and more about concealment in an attempt to fit in with the girls whose acceptance she craves.

The ‘cool’ girls, whose number includes the person Freya once regarded as her childhood best friend, offer Freya a tantalising glimpse of that acceptance when she finds they have been assigned as room-mates.

The pressure to conform to their expectations, however, pushes Freya beyond breaking point and results in her autism becoming public knowledge, with all the social fall-out she had dreaded, but also some unexpectedly positive spin-offs as she discovers that some people are in fact happy to accept her exactly as she is.

At 14, Freya’s diagnosis has come at a time when almost every young person struggles to figure out how they relate to the rest of the world and as such her social anxieties will be readily understood by most young adult readers.

By presenting that world as seen through Freya’s eyes, however, Méabh Collins offers a remarkable insight into the thinking processes and intense emotions experienced by some people with autism and which are usually invisible to others.

Collins deals sensitively with the subject of eating disorders, one of many issues Freya is at pains to conceal and deny, and reveals much about the intolerable strain that efforts to function in so-called ‘normal’ society can place on someone with autism.

The often unsuccessful attempts to read social cues, interpret sarcasm and jokes, and process strings of multiple statements are concepts we may already be familiar with, along with the possibility of sensory overload. 

It is Freya’s personal perception, her awareness of these challenges and how she might deal with them, that provides teenage readers with an accessible and very human perspective on what can otherwise seem an abstract concept.

Broadening the range of autistic experiences portrayed beyond that of one fictional character, Collins also intersperses Freya’s narrative with extracts from the blog of the equally fictional Rossa, whose Instagram posts serve both to offer Freya support and challenge some of the assumptions that come with the clumsy application of labels such as ‘high’ or ‘low-functioning’.

There is a perhaps deliberate abruptness about the sudden interjection of these blog statements, which allow aspects such as non-speaking autism, stimming, and eye contact to be touched upon without overburdening Freya’s character by becoming all things to all people with autism.

In Freya, Collins has invested much personal emotion, creating a character of extraordinary ordinariness, refreshing in her lack of the genius mathematical gifts often associated with autism and whose struggles will resonate with readers across all age groups.