Fern Brady: “The first time I went on stage, I felt that massive sense of relief, like I was finally able to be myself.” Photo: Jim Lee
At 34, Fern Brady's comic career was peaking. What began as a chance stand-up routine at the Edinburgh Fringe had set her on the path to stardom.
She was touring with Frankie Boyle, appearing on Live at the Apollo and on comedy television shows, including cult-classic Taskmaster.
Everyone wanted a piece of the scathingly hilarious Scot. But behind closed doors, things were falling apart.
Misadiagnosed with OCD and depression as a teenager, she was committed to a psychiatric unit.
In adulthood she became addicted to Xanax, and despite asking repeatedly for help, no one could tell her why she was regularly destroying her furniture.
Finally, she was diagnosed as autistic, but like many women and girls, had become adept enough at masking to slip through the cracks.
Her Nero Award winning memoir - Strong Female Character - charts a childhood and anguished adolescence of a misunderstood misfit through the lens of this recent diagnosis.
As a child she started to have “meltdowns” after school, she tells Nine to Noon.
“When my parents first got a school report, they said Oh, she's so quiet and well behaved and they were like, 'you must be thinking of a different kid', because I was coming home every day and having these huge meltdowns.
“And this is a really common thing in autistic girls particularly is they hold everything in school, and then they come home. Everything's just bottled up, it's like shaking a can of fizzy drink and it explodes.”
She also struggled with uncomfortable sensations as a girl and exhibited behaviour that was labelled as being difficult.
“I was having meltdowns over the sensation of my school blazer, or my parents would braid my hair tightly, and I would have a meltdown over that.
“But at the time, that was all just seen as me being deliberately difficult and badly behaved.”
She soon learnt to navigate the neurotypical world.
“I heard an autistic woman saying, it's like having to speak French fluently, or having to speak French 16 hours a day, but you're not a fluent, native speaker of it.
“You can learn it, you can study it really hard, but it's never going to be intuitive. And it's never going to be your native language. And that's what autistic masking feels like. For me, I learn social cues, then, sort of systematically and through pattern recognition.
“And I know that when someone says, ‘What are your plans for tomorrow? They usually mean, I want to speak about something general and light-hearted and you should list one thing from your day, rather than every single thing that you plan to do tomorrow.”
The meltdowns continued into adulthood, her career was on a high but she would go home and smash things up.
“I was basically living this private hell, where I would come back from stressful times at work and punched through a wall or destroy my own stuff, and I couldn't work out why.
“And that was what pushed me to get diagnosed. Because for ages, I thought I don't want to label I was fairly sure that I was autistic. But I thought, I don’t want to go to the doctors.
“But I was destroying my house, like I bought a new house. And I was kicking through walls and stuff, and it was horrible. “
Photo: Penguin Random House
She spent a year tracking those meltdowns, she says.
“This is very autistic; I created a system where I tracked what I thought triggered the meltdowns. And I did that every single day for a year.
“Because I just could not get any advice on it. And thankfully, this year, I got something called a sensory diet, which is really something I should have received as a child or a teenager.
“And that's really worked out my different sensory needs. And all the things I need to do to prevent meltdowns. So that was really good.”
Her move into stand up came about when she was sent on a job as a trainee journalist.
“I got a story, a really hack story where they say, go and try stand up. And then write about how hard it to do stand up.
But secretly, I had really wanted to do stand up.”
It pushed her to do something she might otherwise have avoided, she says.
“I never would have tried stand up if my editor hadn't pushed me into doing that article. Because I remember being so physically nervous. I was like, being sick. I was shaking all over. And that gave me the push I needed onto the stage. I think about that a lot. I really don't think I would have done it if they hadn't gotten me to do the article.”
She became hooked on performing live, she says.
“I often get asked, 'oh, if you're autistic do you find the lights and sound on stage difficult', and often the lights are a bit too bright.
“But my gig is the least stressful part of my day, being on public transport is a way more frightening thing, or trying to go to an industry party is so much harder than the bit where I stand on stage.
“The first time I went on stage, I felt that massive sense of relief, like I was finally able to be myself.”
Fern Brady is currently touring her show, I Gave You Milk To Drink, and will be in Auckland for the International Comedy Festival in May.
