Aoife Dooley: 'I was like, "F**k off. I’m not autistic. I’d know if I was"'
Aoife Dooley, author/illustrator of Frankie’s World. Picture: Ruth Medjber
The eponymous hero of the new Irish graphic novel, Frankie’s World, talks too much, often says the wrong thing at the worst time and feels a bit different from others in her class. She loves art, pizza and rock music and doesn’t like school, hospitals and pop music.
The strapline on the cover declares: “A little bit brave. Sometimes bold. Totally me.” Might that also describe its creator, author and illustrator Aoife Dooley?
“I think it would,” says Dooley, considering the point, “in the sense that when I was growing up I was very similar to Frankie, where I would have said the wrong thing at the wrong time. And I would have been perceived as bold. But I was always myself.
"I didn’t have the tools to kind of hide who I was then. I didn’t know how to mask. So when I was really that young I think I would have been probably all three of those things without realising it, if that makes sense.”
Her differences make Frankie believe she must be from a different universe. She therefore concludes that her father is an alien, and so Frankie and her small but tight band of misfit friends set out to track down her absent father in a Wizard of Oz-type adventure, complete with Wicked Witch adversary.
Frankie is 11-years-old when she receives the diagnosis that she is autistic, and suddenly everything in her life starts to make sense. It was later in life before Dooley had a similar epiphany, prompted when an autistic friend suggested that Aoife was just like him.
“I literally turned around to him and I was like, ‘F**k off. I’m not autistic. I’d know if I was – I’m 27.’
"And little did I know that a lot of women don’t know,” she continues. “And some women never find out. I had no idea that it represented itself differently in women than it does in men. So after looking into it then – ‘oh! This is me'.”
Twenty-seven years is a lot of time to be living life a certain way. It left Dooley with a lot of mixed feelings.
“I think there’s a lot of: ‘Okay, this makes a whole lot of sense. This is such a relief to find out. Now I know why I behave like this. And that’s why I know that I do this thing.’
“It’s a relief in that sense. But then there also is the other part that you go through when you find out as an adult, and you kind of like grieve for your younger self. And it’s a really heavy thing to go through because you’re literally assessing your life all over again and kinda going: ‘Oh. That happened because I’m autistic. And this happened. And I was treated this way and people thought I was stupid because I didn’t learn in a particular way that everyone else learned'."
Dooley says people thought she was stupid because she pronounced certain words differently. “I would have blamed myself for years on those things. And then after finding out, it’s like okay… no. I just need to learn in a different way. I’m a visual thinker. I’m not someone who will sit down and read a manual on something. I’ll watch a video on it.”
Everyone has different ways of learning. So I think both of them are important because I think you have to go through the bad stuff, too, that has happened so you can kind of accept it and just know that it wasn’t your fault, you know. I think that’s something that a lot of autistic people have to go through at some stage or another.”
Inspired by her working-class background growing up in Coolock, Dooley’s first book, How to be Massive, began life on her Instagram account. Her second illustrated book, Junior 123 Ireland!, won the Specsavers Children’s Book of the Year at the 2019 An Post Irish Book Awards, but having received her diagnosis in 2018 she made autism the focus of her writing.
“Something that I kept thinking about was… if I had seen someone like myself on TV or in a book I would have known way sooner. So that’s why I do talk about it. It’s made a huge difference in my life understanding that aspect of myself.”
- Frankie's World is available now, published by Scholastic
