The Importance of Being a Weirdo

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I feel like I wrote a book about the kind of gloomiest, weirdest part of myself. Even people who are totally at the centre in a way they don't think about also have moments where they think about themselves as outsiders. Or there are always bits of themselves that they have to leave outside the circle because they don't fit in order to be 'weird' In my own world, I don't feel weird at all. I feel like everyone else is weird. So, while I always feel like an outsider, I also feel like my centre is the truth,. you know, in that very arrogant, human way. If you can put weird on and off, you're not

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

JOANNE LINKS

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Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

KATHERINE LINKS

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