‘Painful, raw and with an honesty that rings clear as a bell’ Catherine Simpson, author of When I Had a Little Sister

A searing account of a mother’s late-diagnosis of autism – and its reaching effects on a whole family.




‘[A] vividly told and profoundly affecting memoir’ The Bookseller




‘A brilliant, searing account and I defy anyone not to be gripped by it.’ Sally Magnusson



Anna grew up in a house that was loving, even if her mum was ‘a little eccentric’. They knew to keep things clean, to stay quiet, and to look the other way when things started to get ‘a bit much for your mum’.


It’s only when her mother reaches her 70s, and Anna has a family of her own, that the cracks really start to appear. More manic. More irrational. More detached from the world. And when her father, the man who has calmed and cajoled her mother through her entire life becomes unwell, the whole world turns upside down.


This is a story of a life lived with undiagnosed autism, about the person behind the disorder, those big unspoken family truths, and what it means to care for our parents in their final years.