From Mad in the UK: I have just finished working on a novel called ‘The Matchbox Girl’ which is a fictional account of the life of the real Dr Asperger who worked in the pioneering Curative Education Ward at the Vienna Children’s Hospital in the 1930s and 1940s. The story is told in the first-person voice of a fictional young woman named Adelheid Brunner who is a patient at the Clinic. I started to write the novel in 2018, and I always knew it would be challenging. In particular, I worried about finding the right voice for Adelheid. This question became especially troubling when lockdown arrived because writers became subject to vicious online attacks for allegedly representing certain groups in insensitive ways. While I do not condone such attacks, I can understand the frustrations which motivate them. The publishing industry does exclude many groups and, even when trying to promote more diverse stories, it often falls into tokenism and commodification. How could I avoid these pitfalls while also maintaining the nuance essential to a good novel?
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