🛎️ Zoom Link for Wednesday's Live Late Diagnosis - Book Club Meeting 🛎️
April's book club pick is a novel — and it might be the most neurodivergent book you've never heard of.
In case you missed it in the April 1st email, on Wednesday at 8am PT, 11am ET, 4pm UK, and 5pm Europe, we will be getting together on Zoom to discuss the Book of the Month, Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. I’m sending this message early in case you haven’t had a chance to get the book yet. There is still time.
This month, we are doing something a little different. Our book club pick for April is a work of fiction and I think you are going to love it.
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi is a novel that will make you question everything you thought you knew about memory, storytelling, and whose version of events counts as the truth. It is also, without ever using the word, one of the most neurodivergent novels I have encountered. It is a book about what it costs to be the person whose complexity doesn’t fit the account someone else wrote of you, and what it takes to insist on your own version anyway.
It won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2019. It was a finalist for the Pulitzer. Critics called it “sickeningly intense,” “a masterwork of narrative destabilization,” and “the kind of novel that makes you sit up straighter.”
Why this book, why this month
Our theme with April Neurodivergent Narratives editor Libby Banks is exploring complexity and internal contradictions: the parts of ourselves that don’t add up neatly, the experiences that resist simple telling, and what happens when we stop trying to make them make sense.
This is exactly where Trust Exercise exists. It does not just describe complexity, it enacts it. I have never read a book quite like this. I’ll walk you through it on our call and how it personally helped me rectify some experiences I had in theatre school.
The novel is structured so that the reader experiences firsthand what it feels like to have their understanding rewritten by someone who was there all along and was never given the microphone. You will finish it feeling like you have been through something. It’s very cathartic, honestly. Especially if you had any school trauma which I most definitely did.
The book connects directly to Libby’s four prompts this month. Week one asks you to write from inside a container that never fit. Week two asks you to borrow a form and let your real story press through it. Week three asks you to write back against the documents that got you wrong. Week four asks you to describe the space you finally built for yourself. Trust Exercise does all four of those things simultaneously in the novel's architecture itself. It’s WILD! Reading it alongside the prompts creates a conversation between the creative work and the fiction that I think will open something up for you.
A note on how this pick came together
This book found me in a slightly roundabout way. While watching Vladimir, the new Netflix limited series starring Rachel Weisz and Leo Woodall that arrived on March 5th, the unnamed protagonist teaches a course in Women’s Fiction. Her syllabus includes books like Beloved, The House of Mirth, The Awakening: canonical texts of female interiority and constraint. And then, listed alongside those classics, I noticed Trust Exercise by Susan Choi. I hadn’t heard of it. Listen I spend a lot of time reading and if there is a book being taught in a women in fiction intro course that I don’t know, it’s gonna catch my attention. While watching Vladimir, I grabbed the book on Libby and was diving in before episode 1 wrapped. (Yes, I read and watch TV at the same time. Hello, hyperlexia.) The book was finished before the series was. Actually, maybe it was at the same time. Anyway, the book is a mirror of the miniseries.
Which brings me to your alternative.
If reading isn’t your thing this month, or even if it is
Vladimir is a completely valid companion to this session, and I genuinely recommend it whether or not you read the novel. Both centre on a woman navigating an institution where power, desire, and creative identity are hopelessly entangled. Both ask whose version of events we trust, and why. Both are deeply interested in what women do with complexity they are not supposed to have, and both refuse to resolve that complexity into something tidier or more comfortable than it actually is.
That refusal to resolve is worth sitting with. One of the things we practice in therapeutic writing is staying inside an experience long enough to let it tell us something true, rather than rushing to the conclusion that makes it easier to carry. Both Trust Exercise and Vladimir model that practice in their storytelling. They ask you to hold contradiction, tolerate ambiguity, and trust that meaning will arrive if you don’t force it. Kind of like being a Late-Identifying Autistic person in a Neuronormative world.
Watch Vladimir, read Trust Exercise, do both, or do neither. You will still get enormous value from our session. I will give enough context that you will be fully in the conversation, and I suspect more than a few of you will finish the session and go straight to one or the other.
Practical details
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi is comes in at just under 260 pages and reads quickly — especially for my theatre kids. It’s set in a performing arts high school for gifted and talented (aka neurodivergent kids). If you are starting today you could still have time to read it. Vladimir is streaming now on Netflix. Eight episodes. There will be some spoilers on our book club session, so if that bugs you, you might want to catch this one on recording, but we’ll do a 20-30 minute catch-up at the beginning before we jump into the book, so don’t stress too much. Come, and you can leave early or turn off the sound when spoilers come up. I’ll be sure to give a warning.
I cannot wait to discuss both with you.
You can get the book on libby or buy it almost anywhere:
US Amazon - https://www.amazon.com/Trust-Exercise-Novel-Susan-Choi/dp/1250231264
UK Amazon - https://www.amazon.co.uk/Trust-Exercise-Susan-Choi/dp/1250309883
The link to join the Zoom Meeting is below. Paid members will see it. If you don’t see it, either you are not a paid member, or you are logged in to the wrong account. If you are not a member, you will need to subscribe to have full access and to see the link below. If you would like a free subscription for April, just reply to this email, and we will get you a free trial month.
