The Complexity of Shame

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I find it weird too, but also I think I've really successfully internalised a lot of shame and fear about not being part of it. So, I never feel able to assert most of the time that I'm the one that's got it right. I always have a sense where you could be wrong, you could be completely wrong. You're always conscious of wearing whatever it is for wearing at that point. Exactly. And how convenient that is on. Mm. Thank you, Joanne. That was just such a great conversation, aren't we? It'salways great to talk to you.

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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