A Room Called Earth author Madeleine Ryan: ‘We should look at autism as a diamond with lots of facets’

Last summer, Madeleine Ryan shocked New York Times readers with an article headlined: “Dear Parents: Your Child with Autism is Perfect”. In an attempt to “add some sparkle to a damaged narrative” that framed neurodiverse kids as difficult and disordered, the 32-year-old Australian writer, director and actor made a crisp case for those on the autistic spectrum as essential truth tellers and joy seekers capable of putting us all in touch with our real feelings. “I know,” she wrote, “because I’m autistic.”

This month, Ryan publishes the extraordinary debut novel that proves her point. A Room Called Earth covers one night in the life of a young, autistic woman, during which she offers an intensely sensuous account of attending a party, drinking, dancing, making conversation and falling for a lovely new man. The dazzling directness of her prose opens thrilling new doors into the female experience of the sexual, spiritual and social worlds in a way that made me think autism is precisely what feminism has been waiting for, just as Greta Thunberg has shown it’s what our planet needed.

“Wow! I’m so glad you feel that way!” grins Ryan over a video link from her rural home in Victoria. “The novel is as much a celebration of the feminine way of processing the world as a neurodiverse way of processing it. I really believe that when we cater to the needs of neurodiverse people, then the needs everybody else has been suppressing are met. Nobody likes fluorescent lighting or itchy clothes, right? But neurotypical people put up with them because it’s polite whereas an autistic person might scream and refuse to tolerate it. Women have put up with a lot of discomfort they should not have to tolerate.”

Only recently diagnosed as autistic – following years of being labelled “anxious”, “depressed”, “manic”, and a sufferer of “eating disorders” – Ryan tells me that growing up as an autistic girl was “very hard. Very, very hard”.

The only child of a “polite, well-to-do, intellectual” couple – both journalists – Ryan says she was “written off as a weird, creative and sensitive child. Always the novelty item in any friendship group because I stirred things a certain way that could be quite confronting for people.” Feeling her natural impulses were “wrong”, she studied TV and magazines for clues on how to behave and practised facial expressions in front of her bedroom mirror because “all I wanted was to be someone else”.

She turned her bedroom into “a fortress of fashion magazines” and internalised all the poses of the models, camping it up for her parents’ camera. Looking at those images gave her the ability to celebrate her own body, but also an awareness of how it would be judged by others, making her wish, at times, that she could “take it off and hang it on a hook”. “I noticed the magazines were telling me both to fit in and to stand out,” she says. “So I tried to do both at different times in different ways.”

She startles me by admitting her earliest memory of consciously masking herself in this way dates back to when she was just two or three years old. “I had already worked out there was a lot of shame around expressing my feelings directly. I have more memory of the choice inside me to stop saying things than of the events that led me to make that decision because I suspect that upsetting or disappointing people was quite traumatic for me. And I remember being this tiny girl when my parents took me on holiday to the beach for the first time. Mum was nervous that the house they rented wasn’t right for us. But as we walked in my dad said: ‘I like it.’ And I piped up, in this sweet bright voice: ‘I like it too!’”

Ryan sighs as she recalls how much her parents “adore” that memory. “They thought it was the most gorgeous thing. But my own memory is of me imitating them and learning about the beautiful response you get that from agreeing with people.” She says the moment “really imprinted on me” and caused a damaging ripple effect that has taken her decades to unpick. Because when little girls are conditioned to say “I like it too” they stop asking themselves what they really do like.

“It goes so deep that you convince yourself you like what people want you to like,” says Ryan. “Now I’m having flashbacks of all the guys I got involved with in my teens. When your mind is inclined to take concepts like that to logical extremes you can end up in some precarious situations. I remember dating this one gorgeous guy who got into drugs and driving really fast and I remember being in his car when I thought: how did I get here? How did I not see this coming? I did not ‘like this too’.”

Leaning back in her chair, Ryan closes her eyes for a few seconds. “If you’re not inclined to judge others you just accept the behaviour even when it’s destructive. You just keeping observing and learning the pattern: oh, he’s doing that because of… oh yeah! That’s giving him adrenalin, that’s giving him solace. Oh and he’s looking at me like that because he wants a response. Analysing without judging can be a gift but it can be quite dangerous. I had to relearn a language to trust my intuition.”

Like the heroine of her novel, Ryan was also “very bad at gossiping. I was interested in people but not in bitching, which is what the other girls wanted. I’m very ambitious. Some men have said that makes me competitive. But I have a torn relationship with the idea of competition. I just want to do my thing the best I can do.”

Ryan also struggled to find an outlet for her anger. “As a teenager I got really into running as a way of processing the rage and the hot energy in me. I still run every day – it’s a really important outlet for me. But I didn’t have a language for it. There’s so much shame around anger, especially in girls.”

She didn’t realise how thoroughly she had repressed this “hot energy” until she was at acting school in her twenties. “I was doing a scene during which the teacher asked: ‘Where’s the anger?’ I thought: ‘Oh, I don’t know!’ She said I was being dishonest, but I genuinely couldn't find it. Then one day, later that same year I was going out the door of my parents’ house after an argument with my dad and I got in the car and I realised: ‘Oh my god, I’m angry!’ When I put the word and experience together the weight just lifted. It allowed me to surrender to it and let it pass. Because it had been in the dark. My parents are such polite, well-to-do people so they struggled when I then became all obsessed with my newfound anger. I wanted to go boxing and punch it out and my mum was horrified. But that’s a cultural phenomenon around many difficult feelings. Releasing them safely is a struggle for everybody.”

She’s now a big advocate of punching pillows, or screaming into them. “Anger often comes out surprisingly quickly if you do that,” she says. “I’ll put aside half an hour to beat the bed and light a candle and meditate, but it’s usually gone in a couple of minutes if you give it permission to move through you. Then it’ll either be really funny or make space for a powerful, helpful thought. If more people in the world did that – wow, we’d be in a very different world.”

All of Ryan’s self-awareness is the product of a decade during which she “moved to the countryside and stopped reading the fashion magazines she once loved, following a late epiphany while reading InStyle magazine with her mum. “I was looking at the images in front of me and I said: ‘Oh my god, there’s nothing critical in the magazine at all!’ And my mum laughed and said: ‘Of course not, darling.’ I realised nothing was being said and they were all the same. I was horrified. It shattered the illusion I’d created. I still bought them for a while, buying French Vogue because the words didn’t matter, it was all about the visual stimulus. But then I stopped buying them completely.”

Ryan also quit reading fiction for years because she realised she would lose herself in the characters. Beginning to write herself, she would absorb and mimic the styles of her favourite authors. “So I only read books about self-help, psychology and spirituality. They really helped me reflect and discover what felt empowering for me. Despite their best intentions, my parents didn’t know how to do that. I learned how to be abundant and connected with people in a way that wasn't necessarily dependent on what I said, or whether I replied to their texts. I found a deeper place for my self to exist.”

The smart, magical voice she has found in A Room Called Earth is unlike anything else you’ll find this year. In it, you’ll hear Ryan’s heroine rejoice in the ritual of getting ready for her night out before carefully unpicking the social scene around her, noticing how the young men and women at the party want to be perceived and how they succeed or fail.  You’ll feel for the girl standing alone in a dark garden, regretting her high heels and her dislike of small talk. You’ll thrill with her on the dance floor, with her kimono sticking to her skin as she imagines herself wearing golden armour “wielding an enormous electric blue sword which is cutting through all the delusions and lies and galloping, galloping, slicing, slicing”.

When Ryan’s heroine meets a “Viking” of a man in the queue for the bathroom she writes, arrestingly: “I took a deep breath and saw a bright pink web tracing its way from my heart and vagina to his heart and penis. It’s strong and effervescent. The mere idea of it is making me blush. I want to weep and fall to my knees and whisper to the universe how grateful I am for being here and feeling what I feel and seeing what I see and knowing what I know.”

Did she feel vulnerable, writing about sexuality like this? “Mmmm,” nods Ryan. “But I feel like it all makes sense to me. When people say that I write about sex so honestly, I can’t imagine how else they’d want the subject to be. I’ve been sensitive to other people’s vulnerability in talking about it, but I’ve never really understood the shame around it. I appreciated that people don’t want to be seen because they’re scared of being judged or ridiculed or rejected and so the repression is not about the person but the responses of others. Body parts and attraction to others and fantasies are things we’re all experiencing round the clock to varying degrees of intensity.”

Ryan stresses that she’d feel “mortified” and “betrayed” if a lover wasn’t honest with her in bed, so why should she offer anything less? But she concedes this hasn’t always been the case. “That’s another place where the ‘I like it too!’ response has such extensive ramifications. On one level you can feel ‘I’m pleased because you’re pleased’ but, hmm, are you? In both my life and my characters’, we’ve ended up in moments where it cannot be denied that we DON’T like it too. It’s had to get to these really intense physical encounters where I’ve been forced to feel: ‘Oh, no. NO.’ I mean, from there a whole new awareness can emerge. But it’s unfortunate that it had to get to those points.”

Today Ryan hopes that her book can help readers find “a new, liberating, sensitive language” for the suppressed feelings that autistic people cannot continue to hide from themselves and often from others.  

“I’m conscious of the line between helpful honesty and when directness is being used to shock, intimidate or provoke,” she says. “I hope the book does a gentle dance with that. The sex scenes I find very intimate, tender and sensual. As well as awkward and a bit clunky, right? The mixture of my heroine’s memories and traumas with what’s physically occurring in her present is what happens to us, isn’t it? There’s a huge mix of stimulus: memories, fantasies, experience… a whole web of beautiful, messy, human stuff.”

Although her New York Times article was criticised by some parents of autistic kids for making light of the struggles they face in dealing with challenging and sometimes violent behaviour, Ryan says that “we should look at autism as a diamond with lots of facets. I feel we all know about the difficult, grimy, confronting, painful facets. I wanted people to see another facet. I wanted people to find the acceptance and feel the joy.”

“In my own work,” says Ryan, “I'm really driven by that joy. When I'm writing I go into such a transcendent zone. I want my readers to feel they are hurtling towards something sublime. I want to take them to their most precious, expansive place. You never know what’s behind the next door.”

 ‘A Room Called Earth’ (RRP £14.99) is published by Scribe UK on 14 January