The Importance of Being Different

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I was thinking just now about medicine in general, actually, and how the way it's taught is here's a problem you can solve. And when someone comes with some rumbling chronic condition or some vague difference, it isn't a problem you could solve. I've been uninteresting to doctors and uninteresting psychologists as well in my tough life. There's something in there for me. It gives you room to be different and not to be easily definable because it is a word that doesn't have a clear definition.

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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