A sequel to Unmasking Autism is coming soon!

Unmasking for Life: for when you've realized you're neurodivergent, and now suddenly a whole bunch of shit in your life has got to change.

Unmasking for Life — now available for preorder, out in hardcover, ebook, and audio formats on March 25, 2025.

It was around this time last year that I finished writing the proposal for Unmasking for Life: The Autistic Person’s Guide to Connecting, Loving, and Living Authentically and sent it off to my editor. Now I’m pleased to announce that the full book has been written, the bulk of the editing has been completed, the cover has been chosen, and a few Advance Reader Copies have been printed and sent to my home!

(This is my first time doing a proper “cover reveal” that isn’t just uploading a .jpg of the cover to my Instagram. Apparently when a book has as wide of a reach as Unmasking Autism, the publisher prints advance copies of the sequel for you [and bookstores and potentially endorsers of the book] to see.

The success of Unmasking Autism is also why there haven’t been any paperback copies released yet, by the way. When a book is already selling incredibly well, the fourth largest publisher in the world has no financial incentive to provide it to consumers in a cheaper format, you see. Expect paperback copies of Unmasking Autism to be released sometime next year, and in the meantime, remember there are many alternate ways to access the book on platforms that my publisher has legally attacked, with devastating archival consequences, but which I fully support you using if you can’t afford to buy a copy. Intellectual property is theft.)

Unmasking Autism’s sales figures, from the Penguin Random House author portal.

The reach of Unmasking Autism has transcended all my expectations, and with it has come a steadily growing awareness of just how many people are struggling to find and accept themselves as neurodivergent in this world. Nearly two hundred thousand of you have determined either you are likely Autistic, or that someone very close to you is, and that it’s worthwhile to re-examine all your old misconceptions of what the disability is and whether “neurotypical” standards hold any value for you.

When I was writing the book, I had no idea whether my personal story of coming into an Autistic identity and struggling to forge an authentic, messy, often frail neuro-freaky existence for myself would be resonant. I’ve since learned that it is, from a wide swathe of people across the globe, of all ages and backgrounds.

The book has been translated into twelve different languages, passed out by therapists, studied by educators, and thoughtfully considered by the family and friends of disabled people worldwide, in addition to many neurodivergent readers. Every single day, I receive at least one message from someone who is slowly coming to discover that they’ve been nursing a hidden social and developmental disability all of their life, and that in light of that revelation, everything about who they are has been recontextualized.

But most of all, I’ve been made aware of what is still missing. Unmasking Autism offers readers a novel way to look at their own disabilities, and encourages them to embrace an Autistic identity if they wish — but embracing that identity often introduces new problems.

How are you supposed to exist in public life anymore, after you’ve admitted that going outside causes an assault of sensory pain? What are you supposed to say to get your family members to respect your accessibility needs, when they’re all deeply masked and in denial about their own disabilities? And once you’ve figured out that your burnout is caused by a fundamental disconnect between your own abilities and what capitalism demands of you, how the fuck are you supposed to survive?

These are the kinds of questions I wanted Unmasking for Life to explore — questions that readers of Unmasking Autism have asked me time and time again. And so I hunkered down, did my research, read the literature, consulted with disabled experts and advocates, and interviewed dozens of disabled, mad, and neurodivergent people about their lives. I also thought really carefully about the politics of disabled liberation and community formation, and tried to develop a vision of what neurodivergent people really would need to lead lives free from neurotypical constraints.

My forthcoming book is the fruit of all that labor — and of the thousands of hours of conversations I’ve had with readers over the past several years. If you like, you can call this book Unmasking Autism 2.0. Because after you’ve completed the messy work of unmasking yourself, you’ve eventually got to turn your gaze outward, and start taking steps to unmask your entire life — reshaping your friendships, familial bonds, romantic and sexual connections, means of survival, plans for the future, and sources of life meaning until they line up with your genuine values and needs — rather than forcing yourself to follow the neurotypical script.

Unmasking for Life is a very practical book, encouraging the disabled reader to contemplate their needs in several key areas of existence (friendship, family, work, love, and life), and providing a series of reflection tools, self-advocacy exercises, and resources to help them get those needs met. It all hinges on the exercise of five core unmasking skills designed to help make you louder, bolder, more outspoken, more defiant, and more radiantly weird in whatever ways feel right for you.

You can think of these as the opposite of the “social skills” of compliance and agreeability that most of us had drilled into our heads as children. The five core skills for unmasking are:

Every Autistic person who wants to build a more accommodating and authentic life for themselves will eventually need to utilize these skills.

If you wish to broaden your social horizons or try something new, a healthy acceptance of change will eventually figure in.

If you’re used to people walking all over you because masking has rendered you agreeable and passive, then learning how to productively engage in conflict with others can help you break out of that.

If maintaining an unremarkable neurotypical facade has led you to lead an unfulfilling, hollow ghost of a life, then you’ll need to work on becoming more openly transgressive and different, so you can live the way you actually want to.

If your family doesn’t accept your Autistic self-diagnosis, then a strong tolerance of disagreement will help you realize they can just fuck right off.

And finally, when all the economic and social structures presented to you are a terrible fit for how your body and mind actually works, then you’ve got to pull together your community, access all the resources you can find, and create your own boldly Autistic solutions to your problems.

A relationship can be whatever you want it to be. This resource is designed to help you think about what you want your connections to look like, rather than relying on neuro-normative definitions of friendship, romance, or family.

Unmasking skills aren’t a remedy for all the injustice and exclusion Autistics face in the world, but they can help strengthen us, bring us together, and prepare us to wage the many little battles that we must fight in order to survive. Together, we can make a world less ruled by the oppressive force of neurotypicality, but we’ve got to learn to liberate ourselves and our comrades first.

Another example table from the book.

While it’s categorized as a “prescriptive nonfiction” (read: self-help) book, as all my books have been, Unmasking for Life doesn’t try and prescribe any one specific solution to a neurodivergent person’s problems. If you want to work a full-time job with benefits, the book has advice for faking your way through a job interview and getting by doing the minimal amount of labor at work (while sowing the seeds of a future union push). If instead you think you’d rather live off government disability benefits, or do sex work for spare cash while living on a houseboat, I’ve got you covered too. Lots of Autistic people live in those ways, and you can hear some of their stories in the book.

Whether you want to repair your relationship to your not-so-accepting family, or estrange yourself from them altogether and build a new one, there are tips in this book for each of those possible outcomes, and tools to get you reflecting on exactly what it is that you do wish to do. I know I don’t have all the answers, and my deepest want is for every neurodivergent person to be able to discern what’s best for themselves, and then go after it with courage and empowerment.

I could gush all day long about the ideas in this book and how excited I am to see readers explore and expand upon them, and I’m sure I’ll be running an excerpt on here in advance of publication. But for now, I’ll close with the nitty gritty publication details:

• The book comes out March 25, 2025 in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook formats.

• The audiobook will be narrated by me.

• You can preorder the book on Penguin Random House’s site right now! Or anywhere you get your books.

• There is a UK release of the book coming out on the same day, published by Octopus. All of the text is the exact same, it just has a slightly different cover and subtitle.

Preorders do really help me continue to, you know, continue having a job as a writer, and so if you can swing it, I appreciate it a ton. The fact that I’m still churning out books is due to your collective support — to everyone who has read a book of mine, reviewed it, recommended it to friends, forced their shrink to read it, passed it along to their parents, taken it out from the library, made videos about it, or pirated it off of libgen, THANK YOU. You have utterly transformed my life.

Though I have been complaining about the weight of public notoriety recently, the immense privilege of getting to write about whatever subjects fascinate me as my means of survival is never far from my mind. I cannot believe I get to make a living doing something I mostly enjoy, which enriches my own life, and has probably had a net positive impact on the world. I live in terror about losing this gift of an existence literally all the time.

Because I have a very stable mind that can handle potential loss REALLY FUCKING WELL.

(which is why I had to write this book, of course. I’m always writing what my neurotic, loss-averse, passive-aggressive, insecure, shy, frozen self most desperately needs to read. So thank you for going along with me on this journey, and enabling me in it.)

Next week’s main article drop is another how-to designed to help you engage with others and be boldly transgressive: an Autistic, trans guide to cruising for sex.