The Horror of Wearing the Wrong Dress

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I don't think I've ever left the house and felt like I've worn the white right thing in public. Sometimes I do because you nail it great. There's a certain kind of, you know, middle class white Cambridge woman white stuff that I can dress up as quite easily. As a young woman, I got it wrong constantly. I could not do young womenhood. The fact that she's wearing the wrong dress makes her feel like a fly gets dying. Like lapping and lapping over. And so on. It's really interesting to me that I endured that in favor of producing something that was consistent and understandable to me.

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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