Strong Female Character

Fern’s parents help her move into her first year accommodations at the University of Edinburgh, despite not having lived with her for the entire summer. She expects university to be a space where she can finally feel free, but she is immediately confronted by the classism of other students and the difficulty of her coursework. Intimidated by asking for help, her grades suffer immensely. She also does not receive adequate funding for housing and other expenses despite supposedly receiving a scholarship.

She receives a call from her father, who tells her she needs to return to Bathgate to speak with the police about the Sian incident. She is charged with common assault and charged £200, in part because she does not follow her attorney’s advice to express remorse over the incident. Around this time, she begins dating John, a good-looking student who comes from a similar class background as her. Fern enjoys “​​how eccentric he was. He felt like my twin, albeit the more popular, confident one” (159). She goes to meet his family and struggles to socialize with them, but she attributes this to the fact that they are Protestant and she is Catholic.

Unable to afford student housing, Fern moves out and begins living with John. Her father and mother separate, and she begins to hyperfixate on her relationship to cope. When they eventually break up, she has nowhere to go other than her mother’s home. Like before, though, her mother eventually kicks her out. Now unhoused, she stops eating regular meals, choosing instead to rely exclusively on cornflakes. At the same time, she retakes her exams in order to move to the next year of her university program, but she blanks on all the material in the middle of the test.

She gets back together with John, but their relationship continues to be toxic. After an attempt to break up with him a second time, John fights and strangles her in bed before holding her head under a pillow. As she suffocates, Fern realizes that he is trying to kill her, but he changes his mind at the last second and takes the pillow off her face. The domestic violence continues, until she finally goes to get a restraining order. After a brief period of separation, during which time a doctor tells Fern she cannot be autistic because of her boyfriend, she and John get back together again. He asks her to write a letter asking the judge for leniency, and his charges are reduced to a breach of the peace, costing him only £200. Shortly thereafter, Fern overdoses on her antidepressants and painkillers. At the hospital, she convinces the doctors that she was not trying to end her own life, and John leaves her.

In order to keep up with her bills at university, Fern begins working as a stripper in Edinburgh. Others don’t seem to know how to respond appropriately to her work, demeaning her for being naked in front of strangers. She says that, ironically, strip clubs were some of the most sexually safe workplaces she ever experienced: “The bind is this: I’ve never lost jobs in a strip club for speaking out about male harassment. We had no shame in calling men out in the clubs. Instead, we just had the offensive man immediately removed by a big Latvian bouncer on steroids” (180). Nevertheless, others seem to feel better about themselves when they demean her for her sex work.

The strip clubs are also very friendly to her needs as an employee with autism. Dim lighting helps with her sensory comfort, the hyper feminine performance is an extension of the masking she engages anyways, and the bluntly transactional nature of the work is socially straightforward. Fern also finds that she enjoys being around the other strippers, feeling a sense of belonging in a large group of women for the first time in her life. The men who frequent the clubs she works at often come from privileged backgrounds, and she does not have much sympathy for them. With the money from stripping, she is able to keep herself afloat during the tumult of her university years.

Toward the end of her time as a student, Fern is increasingly fatigued by the high emotional demands of stripping and the low pay it provides. To make matters worse, her maternal grandfather passes away, forcing her to grieve while she tries to perform for voyeuristic men at the strip club and finish school. This combination of overwhelming factors leads her to have a shutdown, a response wherein a person with autism emotionally or psychologically distances themselves from their circumstances as a coping mechanism. Fern does not recognize it as such, however, because she has not yet been diagnosed.