Fern Brady > Quotes

“I like meeting new people as it means every day is a new opportunity to redeem yourself, to make a fresh start at being seen as a normal woman and practice at it. It's when people get to know you that they realise something seriously off and that's harder to rectify”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“I was continually over-identifying with fiction to try and find a template for myself and my story.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“sheer panic at any kind of uncertainty”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“It's uncomfortable that this isn't all good or all bad or a happy ending or a sad ending, but just a mess that everyone muddled through. It's very painful to start loving someone when holding on to the idea of hating them keeps you safe.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“Just you wait, I thought. I’ll think of something really clever to reply to you in about a decade, just as soon as I replay this scenario in my head dozens of times.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“Arguably, men made me hate men; stripping just let me see them at their most men-ish.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“For all her flaws, my mum never raised me with dysfunctional attitudes to food or made me think I was greedy or not thin enough. She was always clear she disliked me for me.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“How were you supposed to know not to mention necrophilia at Christmas dinner?”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“There's a scene in The Matrix where Neo is programmed with every fighting technique in the world before opening his eyes and saying, 'I know Kung Fu.' There's a similar thing with autistic girls and literature. I had no idea what people were saying. I struggled with socializing, so by reading as widely as possible, I was arming myself with knowledge about people, about how they spoke to each other, learning turns of phrase and metaphor that others - even Erin - recognized.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“Every attempt to fit in resulted in me being more weird and more isolated from normal people.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“It's very painful to start loving someone when holding on to the idea of hating them keeps you safe.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“In my teens and early twenties I frequently had the sense that a madwoman was driving the car of my life while I sat in the back seat observing it and wondering how we ended up here.
This was one of those moments.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“It was absurd that you could just copy what the other person in your house was doing and it would make life more normal, more stable.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“I never understood the appeal of having sex when you're drunk. It's numbing, it's sloppy, and it feels like the alcohol is being used as an excuse to ignore the sex. In my thirties, I wondered if men do this because they're frightened at women laughing at their sexual performance or being better than them. And so they need them to be drunk.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“I guess if I enjoyed sex and didn't feel there were any consequences, I was robbing them of the idea that chastity was vital for social approval and a way of being held in high esteem.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“It's 2022 as I write this and I'm still waiting to find someone I respect to speak openly and in detail about meltdowns. I'm really annoyed that I have to be the one to do this.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“No one ever asks me about the men. All they ever want to know about is the naked bit.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“It made perfect sense to me that my skin was bursting open in disgusting weeping pustules. The emotions felt volcanic and I'd never been good at communicating that to people in words so now my body was doing it for me.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“In my teens and early 20's I frequently had a sense that a mad woman was driving the car of my life while I sat in the backseat observing it and wondering how we ended up here.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“I marveled that women could get away with saying the most insulting things as long as they maintained a soft tone of voice.”
― Fern Brady

“Trying to kill yourself never pans out the way it does in films. In hospital they do ask you if you meant to kill yourself but it's such a factual box-ticking exercise that to answer with any kind of emotion would be mortifying. There's no 'It was a cry for help' box but there should be.
I feel like the doctors and the general public need to raise awareness of how embarrassing most suicide attempts are.
When you're in a backless hospital gown with your worst pants on it's really hard to hold your nerve and say, 'I wanted to die?”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“The song was a big sweeping orchestral number and the violins swelled as she screamed. It was a preposterous song to bottle someone to.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“In a strip club, groups of men are in a safe space where they’re encouraged to play up to hypermasculine ideals - and because they believe no one in power is watching them they project all their shame and irregular feelings about women onto the strippers, who they believe exist in a vacuum and won’t ever speak out about their behaviour or, say, write about it in a tell-all-memoir.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“The question implied that stripping had clouded my judgement and made me a grizzled hag gazing angrily into the middle distance rather than giving me perfect clarity over the fact that the world hates women.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“I wasn't sure how they'd got mental illness conflated with me having done something wrong but there didn't seem to be any chance of reasoning with them now.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“A lot of allistic people I know are primarily motivated by social approval so push any rogue queerness down into their subconscious or suppress their thoughts and only get comfortable with it later in life.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“She was a librarian, dammit.
She knew books. She used the Dewey Decimal System. She taught the children to search with their eyes and their brains. They were encouraged to ask Moira for help, rather than punch titles into a screen. Moira believed all children needed to live through that awkward, precarious moment when they had to disrupt the silence of the library and approach the librarian. It built character.”
― Fern Brady

“Since euthanasia is illegal in Britain, when someone has a stroke and isn’t going to survive, the doctors starve and dehydrate them to death.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“My parents’ belief that my dead relatives could see everything I was doing from heaven was niggling me. Well, at least from heaven you can see how little money I have, I reasoned with Papa’s ghost, figuring that in the afterlife he’d be blessed with an angelic, non-judgemental attitude and would just be smiling down on me benevolently.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character

“As I came off stage at the gig that night, I told my agent I didn't feel right.

"But you did great out there."

"But I feel weird."

The words sounded strained as I said them. I knew this was a big disastrous feeling so couldn't work out why it came out of me so tiny.”
― Fern Brady, Strong Female Character