Book Review: Women and Girls on the Autism Spectrum, 2nd Edition by Sarah Hendrickx

This book has been sitting in my to-read pile for a while, and I finally made time to read it. I’m so glad that I did, and can already tell that this book will be a resource and reference for years to come and I fully expect to reread it. I should note that parts of the book were hard to read as the discussions of issues and challenges for autistic women across the life span were so relatable. If it wasn’t relatable to my own experiences, it was relatable to the experiences of my therapy clients. I kept thinking how important getting a diagnosis is, and how challenging life can be without such an important piece of knowledge about oneself. How many autistic women have struggled over the years because the psychological community focused solely on males, meaning that they missed the way that females experience autism? This continues to be challenging because we are still missing a lot of information. Hendrickx wrote over and over that there was little to no research on a variety of subjects related to autistic women. We need more resources like this and I’m thankful for the work and research that went into it this particular book. I will definitely be recommending it to others going forward! On a side note, almost all of the books I have read on the topic of women and autism that were not memoirs were written in the UK. America needs to catch up!