Nowhere Girl by Carla Ciccone

All her young and adult life, Toronto-based journalist Carla Ciccone struggled: to have healthy relationships, to maintain a healthy relationship with herself and the others, to keep a normal work and life rhythm. As she was later on diagnosed with ADHD she realized how different it would have been her life if all those discrete or obvious manifestations would have been take seriously much earlier.

Nowhere Girl, her memoir, tells her story, but also projects her situation to the scale of a whole generation of women who only recently are getting - though shyly - a new voice. 

Personally, I´ve noticed how gender-segregated is mental health is. Boys are easly labelled as ´ADHD´. For the girls, eating disorders are reason to worry about although boys can also suffer from it. In between, there is no space for diversity, for diagnosis without considering the gender. Medical mysogynie it´s real and affects at a serious pace women, particularly young mothers. Girls struggling in school are easily dismissed as being messy, but the over-activity is read in a very different register. After all, a girl is not supposed to be super active, it is expected to seat and take notes, and eventually shush their stubborn and loud male colleagues.

This narrow mindness is wrong and despite the fact that I am also careful in considering every manifestation which is out of the ´social norm´ a mental disease, I am convinced that often, having the right diagnosis at the right time helps to live better and gettting the right mental and family support.

Ciccone´s story may be the story of many of us, shortly before the social media outburst. It informs and educates while collecting various information from a pool of women affected by ADHD who were interviewed for the book as well as from latest writings on the topic. I´ve found personally the bibliographical add on attached to almost any manifestation of her behavior a bit too obsessive, but this background is useful to circumventing the topic. In the end, the final diagnosis should belong to the specialist.

Nowhere Girl is a book which empowers and open your mind to a different, hopefully more empathic reality for girls and women beyond the limitative framework who ignored the mental and behavioral diversity. A mindful read for educators and parents as well.

Rating: 3.5 stars