Why “Normal” Starts to Look a Bit Suspicious…
By Rachel Jones @HMP_SHE.
I have spent a significant portion of my life answering “How are you?” incorrectly. Neurodivergent Moments: Insights into the Lived Experience of Autism and ADHD by Joe Wells and Abigoliah Schamaun is the first book that suggests this might not entirely be my fault.
There’s a particular kind of book that quietly rearranges your brain while making you laugh out loud in public like a menace. Neurodivergent Moments is exactly that. On the surface, it’s a collection of observations about Autism and ADHD. In reality, it’s more like someone has finally written down all the things that never quite made sense, but you assumed were your fault.
What makes this book feel different from a lot of writing around neurodiversity is its refusal to turn neurodivergent people into either problems to be solved or inspirational case studies. There’s no tidy “overcoming adversity” arc here, and no clinical distance either.
Instead, it sits firmly in the mess: the awkward, funny, frustrating reality of everyday life. It doesn’t explain neurodivergence from the outside, instead it speaks from within it, with all the contradiction, humour, and specificity that usually gets edited out.
The premise is simple: neurodivergent people aren’t broken versions of “normal,” they’re operating with a completely different—often more logical—operating system. The real issue is that everyone else is following a set of invisible social rules that no one has bothered to explain.
Take the classic “How are you?” situation. You think it’s a question. It is not a question. It is a ritual. Answer it honestly and suddenly you’re the problem. The book is full of these moments—tiny social ambushes where logic walks confidently into a wall of unspoken expectations and gets blamed for the collision.
And that’s where it’s at its funniest. Not in a performative, “look how quirky” way, but in that painfully recognisable, slightly unhinged way where you realise: Oh. Oh no. I’ve done that. Repeatedly.
Reading this as a neurodivergent person, there’s an extra layer of recognition that’s hard to shake. It’s not just “that’s relatable.” It is more like, “that explains things I’ve been carrying around for years.”
The reframing is subtle but powerful: replacing “I’m bad at this” with “this wasn’t designed with me in mind.”
That shift lands even harder because I also work as a SEND teacher. I spend my days with young people who are constantly being measured against systems that don’t quite fit them—kids who are bright, creative, and perceptive, but are made to feel like they’re getting something fundamentally wrong. This book feels like the missing translation guide. Not for them, but for everyone else.
There’s a story about a child logically naming a tortoise after their school so it would remember where it had been. That kind of thinking, idiosyncratic, literal, brilliant, is something I see all the time. In most mainstream classrooms, it gets flattened into “incorrect.” Here, it’s allowed to be what it actually is: a different and entirely valid way of understanding the world.
And as an artist, working with layered visuals, projection, and a slightly chaotic creative process, the descriptions of hyperfocus, sensory overload, and building personal systems feel less like deficits and more like the engine. The same traits that make a staff meeting unbearable can also sustain hours of intense, immersive making.
The book is also quietly devastating on systems, particularly education and work. It highlights how much of what we call “professionalism” is really just performative: eye contact, small talk, the correct level of enthusiasm at 8am. There’s a sharp critique here of the workplace too, especially the idea that success depends on navigating unwritten social rituals rather than actually doing the job well.
The section on late diagnosis also hits particularly hard. That moment of realising you weren’t lazy, rude, or incapable, just unsupported, felt particularly OOFT. It hits hard to consider you might have been a wholly different person if you had had the support you needed from childhood.
At the same time, the book doesn’t drift into despair. There’s something genuinely joyful in its insistence that neurodivergent ways of thinking aren’t just valid, they’re valuable and essential.
What makes this book feel really pertinent is that it doesn’t ask for sympathy. It asks for a shift in perspective.
Reading it from the inside as a neurodivergent person, a teacher, and an artist who has struggled for much of her life with social situations, you can start to see just how much potential gets lost in that gap.
Perhaps that’s the quiet provocation running underneath the humour: what if the goal isn’t to help neurodivergent people “fit in” better, but to seriously question why fitting in requires so much distortion in the first place?
By the end, you start to suspect that “normal” is less a natural state and more a very committed group performance that nobody wants to admit they’re improvising.
It’s funny, yes. But it’s also quietly radical.
Perhaps most importantly, this is a book that feels genuinely useful. For neurodivergent readers, it offers recognition, language, and relief. For educators and employers, it challenges assumptions. And for those who consider themselves neurotypical, it might be the most accessible, and entertaining way to realise that the rules they take for granted aren’t nearly as universal as they think.
Neurodivergent Moments: Sex, Sunscreen, Turtles and How (Not) to Pack a Suitcase, will be published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers on June 18.
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