Charlotte Amelia Poe was interviewed by Turnaround to celebrate the release of their nonfiction account of autism; How To Be Autistic.
If there’s one thing you could have readers take away from this book, what would it be?
I think empathy, and the ability to understand autism more complexly. There’s no one way to be autistic, and the title kind of plays on that, it’s not a how-to guide, because there is no how-to guide. I wanted to explain that autistic people are just like ‘everyone else’, we’re utterly unique and often the only thing we have in common is our autism, oh, and the trauma we experience as a result of that, at times.