Hannah Gadsby

Annie burst into tears, and for a brief moment I began to panic that I wasn’t upset, but then I remembered that I was autistic and I finished my snack.

I asked if he had seen my review in The New York Times. He told me that he had, before launching into a very long complaint about how ridiculous some of my reviews had become. “I can’t even fit some of them onto one page, double-sided! I think I might have to stop. I’m not made of toner, you know.” Dad has never had to tell me that he was proud of me, he just showed me through the medium of scrapbooking.

Although I was born and bred in Smithton, I was never a local. To be a local you had to be from a family that was at least four generations deep, that’s just the kind of town Smithton is. Although Dad’s family were North West Coasters, it wasn’t west enough to grant us any kind of local status, and Mum was from the Southern Midlands, so she may as well have dropped in from Mars. The big kids had all been born in Tasmania’s capital, Hobart, which, being on the South East corner of the island, is about as far away as you can get from Smithton without getting your feet wet.