Not Lost, Just Late: Women and the ADHD Awakening
Nowhere Girl, Carla Ciccone. Random House Canada, 2025.
“There’s nothing I love more than intellectualizing my problems rather than confronting them,” writes Carla Ciccone near the end of her reported memoir, Nowhere Girl: Life as a Member of ADHD’s Lost Generation. Not for the first time, I felt bizarrely seen by this smart, vulnerable, and meticulous book.
Full disclosure: I don’t have ADHD. I do, however, have autism, and I recently received my diagnosis at the sprightly age of 45. Many experts believe autism and ADHD are different points on the same spectrum, or at least closely related. And the deeper I dove into Ciccone’s book, the more I found myself nodding fervently along. That’s me. That’s me too. Ciccone calls her cohort “nowhere girls,” because they are “women who have felt like we were running, without a destination, from our emotional demons for most of our lives,” and again, I wonder who’s been giving her access to my darkest thoughts about myself.
ADHD, a neuro-developmental disorder affecting the parts of the brain responsible for attention and organization, seems to be everywhere in the cultural discourse these days. In the 1980s and ’90s, most experts assumed it only existed in boys. But in the last five years, the focus of the conversation around this flavour of neurodiversity, and in particular who has it, has shifted. As Ciccone points out, “world-wide Google searches for ‘ADHD women’ started climbing in April 2020 and haven’t come back down since.” Ciccone, who received her own diagnosis in 2021 at age thirty-nine, explores why so many women are learning these fundamental truths about themselves and their own minds in middle age — a generation of women who were ignored by medical science and left to fumble their way through a world not designed for their brains.
In accessible, conversational prose, Ciccone introduces readers to the brain science and social pressures behind neurodivergent concepts such as masking, stimming, and emotional dysregulation. She illustrates how these terms have manifested throughout her own life with an often wrenching vulnerability, showing us a lonely, isolated girl struggling to belong. But this book is neither a poor-me victim story nor a naïve plea to just accept people’s differences as they are. That’s important because many narratives lean on simplistic tropes of disability as a form of noble suffering or resort to platitudes like “can’t we all just get along?” The problem, Ciccone reassures her reader, isn’t you. It’s the social understanding of neurodiversity that’s broken, not the individual.
While the science in Nowhere Girl never gets overly dense, Ciccone isn’t afraid to show her work. Interviews with experts, from clinical psychologists and ADHD experts to pain researchers and mental health historians, bolster her personal story. Ciccone grounds her experience and her extensive research within the wider context of women’s mental health and our society’s understanding (or lack thereof) of its particular challenges. Importantly, she considers the impact of intersectionality — the idea that social categories like race and gender create overlapping systems of disadvantage. While women and girls are already drastically unrepresented in discussions of neurodiversity, BIPOC women and girls and those from other underserved communities receive noticeably lower rates of diagnosis. Accessing care becomes even more difficult for those who are also members of the LGBTQ+ community. Navigating disability can be a challenge for anyone, but the more layers of marginalization you add, the more discrimination you face in negotiating the medical system.
Ciccone also acknowledges that, in addition to the privilege she has to access any real form of mental health care, there’s a further privilege inherent in having the space to tell your story as she does in this book. Far from claiming her own story as universal, Ciccone collected stories from some forty-odd women with ADHD to inform her narrative. But herein lies a missed opportunity. Ciccone praises these stories as “honest, vulnerable, and beautifully generous,” but we never hear any of the women speak in their own words. Instead, they’re often framed like this: “A few Nowhere Girls shared similar stories of . . . ”” or “Many Nowhere Girls told me that . . . ”
Yes, this book is primarily a memoir. But because Ciccone cites so many different studies and interviews with experts, this semi-silencing of her direct peers — especially when she refers to them with such a familiar, us-against-the-world umbrella term — feels odd. During her 1990s childhood, Ciccone says, “little White boys with ADHD were everywhere, and the rest of us were nowhere.” To offer the solidarity of these additional stories, and then gloss over them, seems like a loss.
But while she may only tantalize us with rare glimpses of these other women, Ciccone’s own resilience shines through the book. After showing us all the struggles and heartbreak, the “haunted merry-go-round of social shame and chaos” that seemed inescapable for most of her life, she manages to leave us with something profound: hope. Becoming a mother, she writes, pushed her to become more of the person she wanted to be, to set down the weight of social expectations instead of passing them on to her daughter. She invites us to see that so many of the challenges faced by neurodivergent women are social constructs, rather than evidence of brokenness or failure. After intellectualizing her problems, she does confront them. She chooses radical self-compassion, and she invites the reader to choose it with her.
The reader who knows or suspects that she, or someone close to her, is neurodivergent will find plenty in Carla Ciccone’s Nowhere Girl to identify with. My own late diagnosis has been a gift. It’s enabled me to recognize wounds that go back to my childhood, to unmask in pursuit of becoming ever more myself, and to meet the needs of my own children with more compassion, openness, and hope for a better future. Maybe, I reflect as I close the book, being seen isn’t such a bad thing after all.
— Morag Wehrle is an author and educator who writes at the intersection of women’s health, culture, and history.
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