Katie Rose Pryal's most recent book, Your Kid Belongs Here: An Insider’s Guide to Parenting Neurodiverse Children (Johns Hopkins University Press), is a “powerful narrative of advocacy, empathy, and resilience,” according to Foreword, where it’s a 2025 INDIES Finalist, Family & Relationships/Adult Nonfiction. Temple Grandin, author of Thinking in Pictures, called it, "Essential reading for parents, teachers, and professionals.”
I had a chance to interview her to learn about the book.
All of your books - whether nonfiction or fiction, memoir, or prescriptive - center neurodiversity and mental health. Why is that the common thread in your work?
I’ve always been a writer—since I was a little kid—and I’ve always been neurodivergent, since I was born that way. Now, I didn’t receive my first diagnosis, of bipolar disorder, until I was twenty and finishing college. But I always knew I was different; I felt different. A lot of times I resented that and wished I could be more “normal.” When I was young and lost, the books I related to were stories about people who were also different in some way. In this, I’m like a lot of kids who are outcasts. I think this is why stories about those who are outcasts or those who break the mold are so popular.
When I started writing novels and essays, and publishing them, I just wrote what I knew, and what I knew was neurodiversity. When I teach fiction writing, I talk about the old adage “write what you know,” but with a twist. For example, no matter how different a character is from me on the page, inside that character’s central core, their drive, the force that guides their decision-making that they are unaware of at the beginning, at least, is something I have experienced, too. For me, it’s the only way I can write about someone who feels deep depression, or helplessness, or addiction, or neglect. Those are things I also lived. And they all come back to being an unsupported neurodivergent person.
Your body of published work is diverse, ranging from academic to poetic and everything in between. What drives your writing?
When I was a professor, I focused on disability studies, in particular neurodiversity and mental health, because learning about how our society treats neurodivergent people was important to me. The easy answer as to why was because I was learning about how society treated me. For example, I researched the bar exam and the questions on the “character and fitness” portion that asked, specifically, whether you have bipolar disorder. Why was that? How does that help or hurt law students and the legal profession? What biases are those questions showing? And how on earth can we get rid of them?
Later, when I left academia, I kept writing, just not for academic journals. I wrote about similar questions—why do we blame mental illness for gun violence? Why do we associate being creative with the “mad genius” myth? Why are accommodations for neurodiversity so hard to come by in school? And so on. I wanted to understand the challenges, and I wanted to make them better. My more “creative” writing—poetry, essays, fiction—do the same thing, just from a different angle.
How has being Bipolar-AuDHD affected your writing career?
As with any neurodiversity, my own has its strengths and struggles. As far as strengths, I see things differently that other people do—spot patterns they cannot see—and then write about them. I’m also able to hyperfocus and get a lot of work done when I’m in the zone.
My main struggle lately has been neurodivergent burnout, which is something that can get worse over time, as in, over years. I’m having to learn how to pace myself, and that goes against every instinct of mine. When I get a dose of energy after a day of rest, I want to expend it right away. But that’s not how you dig out of burnout. You have to keep resting, even when you don’t want to. How frustrating!
The whole world tells neurodivergent (ND) kids, and their parents, that ND kids don’t belong. When I say “don’t belong,” I mean that our society as a whole systematically excludes ND kids from public life. Sure, we might have “autism awareness” month (I prefer “autism acceptance”), but do restaurants really want our kids eating there? Do soccer teams really want our kids to play on them? Do our schools really want our kids in their classrooms? In my experience, and the experience of all of the parents I interviewed and researched, that answer is usually no. It is a rare person or place that is truly accepting of ND kids.
So, as parents, we can feel like the world doesn’t want our families to take part in things that other families take for granted. Our kids feel that same lack of acceptance. Of belonging. Our job as parents is to find other parents like ourselves with whom we can bond and share our experiences. We need that support. And, of course, our job is to find those places where our kids do, indeed, belong. This task begins at home, where we teach our children that they do not need to change who they are in order to be loved. They are loved simply because they are people. If we show them what unconditional love feels like, then later, out in the world, they will accept nothing less.
My younger kid, who is AuDHD like me, frequently says, “If one more person tells me that autism is a super power, I’m going to scream.” As you probably know, autistic kids are incredible b.s. detectors, and he sensed that phrase as patently false from a very young age. Instead, I’m honest with him (and with his brother, of course) when I talk about our neurodiversity. I lay out something they might struggle with and brainstorm ideas for how to support them. And then other times, I point out how something that they are doing is because they did, indeed, receive gifts with their ND brains.
The younger one seems to insist that his ability to be a computer science wizard from the age of ten had nothing to do with how his mind works, but I’m fairly certain he’ll see the light on that one soon enough. I’m kdding—he sees it. He just really wants people to understand how much he struggles, too.
And that’s the point. We can “celebrate” neurodiversity all we want; we can use cute names like “neurospicy” to describe ourselves, but it’s important for everyone, including ND people, to hold space for the fact that being neurodivergent in a world that wasn’t designed for us is hard, and frequently really hard. Those struggles deserve to be supported (by schools, for example) just as much as our strengths deserve to be celebrated.
Katie Rose Pryal is a neurodivergent storyteller, educator, scholar, lawyer, and mother of two neurodiverse (AuDHD) children who writes about neurodiversity with literary precision and a refusal to flatten complex lives. As a bipolar-AuDHD writer and speaker, as well as an expert in mental health and neurodiversity, she tells stories about the outsiders, the misfits, and the beautifully complicated. Her Substack, Misfit Manifesto, shares her thoughts on mental health, creativity, and making our way in a world that isn't always designed for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment