This is a beautiful account of living with someone with autism.
This is so beautifully written
This is a book that everyone should read

An interesting read that I'm glad to have discovered. I'll definitely be seeking out more by this author.

I assume I must have snapped up Anna Wilson’s A Place For Everything on Netgalley as soon as I saw that it was a memoir about her mother’s late-diagnosis of autism but I have no memory of doing so. However, when I came across it one evening recently I was absolutely hooked within the first few lines. Wilson tells such a heartbreaking story with an unbelievable amount of detail and vulnerability. While the main bulk of the book focuses on the last few years of her mother’s life, she also explores her own childhood in flashbacks, revisiting moments that highlight specific incidences of behaviour that are now seen differently in light of her mother’s diagnosis.

The book explores and exposes the strengths and weaknesses of our National Health Service with a strong focus on the lack of support and joined up thinking within our mental health services. Naturally, it’s difficult to pile anything more onto the NHS and those who serve it while we’re mid-pandemic but Wilson reminds us that these issues regarding mental health provisions have been endemic in our society for far too long, something I can also personally attest to. I was taken aback by the harsh reminder that mental health engenders so much anger when other illnesses cause those around the patient to react with empathy and sorrow. I won’t claim that there isn’t also anger towards physical illness and care towards those who are mentally ill, but mental health is so much more difficult to understand as a bystander, it’s hard not to feel anger at a person whose behaviour seems abnormal or avoidable. This can often stay true even after a diagnosis has been sourced. It’s true too in Wilson's recounting of how she and her sister Carrie respond differently to their father’s cancer and their mother’s mental health problems. That said, this memoir is also a love letter to carers, and one in particular, and a reminder of what an incredible job it is.

Though it was compulsively readable, I also found the book very painful to spend time with. Wilson doesn’t shy away from chronicling her darkest thoughts or her mother’s most horrific moments, and the level of unflattering description felt so visceral at times that I found myself cringing and feeling deep empathy not just for Wilson but also for the lack of dignity the book affords her mother. No doubt this transparency will help people in similar situations but I questioned whether I, as a writer, would be able to reveal someone else so thoroughly on paper. My circling thoughts aside though, it’s this very thoroughness that captivated me. There’s long been an issue with diagnosing autism in females and the sad truth at the heart of this memoir is that doing so would have changed Wilson’s mothers life for the better, and that of her family.

I really can’t recommend this book more and am so surprised that this was the first I’d heard of it. I imagine it might hit differently depending on the reader’s individual experiences and I would encourage caution if it might hit a little too hard at this moment in time. For me personally it was an enlightening and fascinating read that will stick with me for a long time.

I read this book over two days; even though I thought I knew where the narrative was going I was compelled to read on and was transfixed by Anna’s story.
It’s such an honest account of caring for vulnerable elderly relatives and the turmoil and emotional strain that this must bring.
I’ve already recommended this to others

This memoir by Anna Wilson is a brave, honest, unflinching and completely engrossing read.

It focuses on Anna's difficult relationship with her mother who is finally diagnosed with Aspergers in her 70s. Anna grew up in a loving home with her sister Carrie, her adored father and her difficult and demanding but loving mother. The memoir goes back and forth between Anna's childhood and adult years and we see how her mother was someone who was always anxious, demanding, controlling and unpredictable but also beautiful, funny, intelligent and loving. Once her mother reaches her 70s her behaviour becomes increasingly more manic and irrational and things begin to fall apart when Anna's father who has always been a calming ad balancing influence on her mother becomes ill.

Anna's complicated emotions shine through in this book - her feelings of love for her mother alongside the hate for her mother's condition, the love for her father and the absolute anger and frustration of attempting to get a psychiatric assessment for her mother. The latter illustrates the failing of our system to support older people with mental health issues. Anna movingly ends the book with acceptance of her mother and her plea for the world to accept, understand and accommodate those like her mother.

This is a beautifully written and heartfelt book that completely grabbed hold of me and captured my heart for 2 days and has stayed with me long afterwards. It made me angry, it made me cry and I had so much empathy for Anna and her family. I would highly recommend it.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a digital ARC

A Place for Everything by Anna Wilson is an affecting and very readable memoir about a daughter being a carer for her elderly parents. It wasn’t quite what I expected as the subtitle led me to believe it was about the author’s mother having Asperger’s and yet there definitely seems to be something more than that going on.

This was an unputdownable, harrowing read. I can't help but agree with the author that her mother's late-in-life diagnosis of Asperger's was of little use to the mother herself, who was at death's door by the time a psychiatrist diagnosed her. I can understand that it helps the author and her sister to have the diagnosis and that this is a huge contribution to them getting over their incredibly difficult childhoods with a compulsive perfectionist. Late in life diagnoses of autism in women are a bit of a trend at the moment - women with Asperger's are better at 'masking' and have traits that aren't easily compared to Rain Man, The Curious Incident etc. - but every case is different, and this book opens up as many questions as it answers. With each chapter opened by a quotation about autism or by someone with autism (again, these appear to be from different people every time and so don't add much) one has to ask whether this book might distress people with autism or put them off having children. What you take away from the book is not so much that Anna's mother was autistic but that she was abusive. I am not saying that the author is adopting a 'one size fits all' approach to autism, but anyone with a working knowledge of it would struggle to share in her surprise.