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'An extraordinary read - intriguing, enlightening and funny.' Jan Ravens
'Sara Gibbs absolutely nails the disorienting experience of growing up with undiagnosed autism.'
Joanne Limberg, author of Letters to My Weird Sisters
'Will resonate with anyone who has ever felt misunderstood.'
Rosie Holt
'A fast and hilarious memoir about love and acceptance. Razor sharp and so very touching.' Lizzy Dent, author of The Summer Job
'For a Drama Queen, Gibbs is sparklingly hilarious.' Desiree Burch
'Full of warmth, insight, heartache, and seemingly effortless humour. It grabs you by the lapels and doesn't let go.' Nick Pettigrew, author of Anti Social
About the author
Sara Gibbs is a UK-based comedy writer, graduate of the National Film and Television School's Writing & Producing Comedy course and prolific tweeter. Her credits include Dead Ringers, The News Quiz, The Daily Mash, CollegeHumor, The Now Show, The Mash Report and Have I Got News for You. She is co-founder of satirical online women's magazine, Succubus, and the founder of The First Laugh Comedy Writing Competition for new writers. Her memoir, Drama Queen, was published in 2021.
Summary
'It has taken me several years of exploration, but I am at a place now where I see autism as neither an affliction nor a superpower. It's just the blueprint for who I am. There is no cure, but that's absolutely fine by me. To cure me of my autism would be to cure me of myself.'
During the first thirty years of her life, comedy script writer Sara Gibbs had been labelled a lot of things - a cry baby, a scaredy cat, a spoiled brat, a weirdo, a show off - but more than anything else, she'd been called a Drama Queen. No one understood her behaviour, her meltdowns or her intense emotions. She felt like everyone else knew a social secret that she hadn't been let in on; as if life was a party she hadn't been invited to. Why was everything so damn hard? Little did Sara know that, at the age of thirty, she would be given one more label that would change her life's trajectory forever. That one day, sitting next to her husband in a clinical psychologist's office, she would learn that she had never been a drama queen, or a weirdo, or a cry baby, but she had always been autistic.
Drama Queen is both a tour inside one autistic brain and a declaration that a diagnosis on the spectrum, with the right support, accommodations and understanding, doesn't have to be a barrier to life full of love, laughter and success. It is the story of one woman trying to fit into a world that has often tried to reject her and, most importantly, it's about a life of labels, and the joy of ripping them off one by one.
Foreword
Sara Gibbs is autistic. She's always been autistic. She just didn't know until she was thirty. This is the hilarious, witty and compelling memoir of a woman's life that didn't make a lot of sense until she was a third of the way through it.
Additional text
Both funny and fascinating in equal measure.
