We Love Books: Hear how Aoife Dooley's autism empowers her and her readers

RTÉ News​

14 hours ago

On this month's We Love Books Podcast, award-winning author, illustrator and comedian Aoife Dooley is in the house to talk about the inspiration behind her new book Squid Squad - her autism diagnosis at the age of 27- and to share what it's been like to have found so much success by opening up and being vulnerable.
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Readers will recognise Aoife's style immediately as bold, colourful and with more than a touch of humour. She has added so much fun and excitement to the world of the young reader but what was her experience with books like as a child?
Aoife explains: "When I was a kid, it was very hard to get me to concentrate on reading, especially novels. If I opened up a novel, I'd read a couple of pages and literally the words would just go in one ear and out the other and I could never take it in."
Enter the graphic novel and everything changes for Aoife. Once she was introduced to the likes of comic strips and Calvin and Hobbes, the visual aspect completely pulled her into the wonderful world of books and she was so hooked that she even became a graphic novelist herself, joining the ranks of beloved Irish authors making a lasting difference to kids' lives.
Aoife is a prolific and accomplished author, but which of her books means the most to her so far?
"I think it would probably have to be Frankie's World because it's a personal story, loosely based on my own life. Frankie's World basically is a story about a girl called Frankie and she doesn't know why she feels so different to everyone else in her class. She kind of starts to think that she's an alien. This is loosely based on my own story of basically finding out that I'm autistic but I found but much later in life at 27 and she finds out a bit younger. It's kind of just the story of figuring out who you are and accepting who you are and being happy in your own skin. It's a story of acceptance and friendship."
So, what changed for Aoife when she received her own diagnosis?
"It wasn't all that much of a shock because I kind of felt my whole life that something was different. Finding out was such a relief. A lot of people think that it's a label and it isn't, you're finding out who you are. You're able to have the tools to understand how you work. Sometimes I might get tired and I might need a break and I might just need some space to myself and without realising that you're autistic and if you just do these things, sometimes people might think you're weird or they might think you're lazy and it really brings it home that this is how my body works and I've been trying to protect myself.
"It's really changed my life finding out and I never thought that writing something like Frankie's World and being vulnerable in my own experiences growing up and being bullied and how I felt would relate so much to kids now. Sometimes it's worth figuring things out because you don't know how it could help other people."
Aoife is keen to keep writing in this space in the future and to keep representing, creating fun and engaging resources for others to understand this experience and to keep connecting with kids who have found such a great pal in Frankie.
For her new book though, Squid Squad, Aoife dives into the great unknown of the hidden world of our oceans with her own colourful flair.
"I love random facts and I like random facts about the sea and I thought this would be really fun because I could use actual facts from real sea creatures but also create my own so there's kind of half real deep sea creatures in this book and the other half I've completely made up."
So, what can readers expect - "A lot of mischief!"
Join Aoife on We Love Books to hear more about her experiences of empowering herself and others through her autism diagnosis, her latest book and of course her top writing tips for kids who'd love to create their own graphic novels.