Funny, shocking, informative, and inspiring.
Feature image credit: Murdoch Books
Marie Claire’s 2022 The Rising Star Award-winning actor Chloé Hayden did not have an easy path to stardom. If you want to learn more about the woman behind the character and her real life, then her debut novel Different, Not Less is made for you.
Incredibly humourous and self-deprecating in manner, this novel is a sleek balance between being a self-help book for the neurodivergent, and a biography. It will appeal to families, colleagues, and friends of the neurodivergent, as an understanding of another’s world can harmonise relationships and teach us all how to accept everyone for who they are.
Author Hayden sets the pace immediately with her introductory chapter Once Upon a Time. In this chapter she takes the reader immediately into her headspace, a place where she lives in Disney fairy tales, as from an early age she did not feel part of the world in which she lived.
Whilst this idea may sound fanciful to the majority of the population, she makes it clear we will be seeing life her way, and she cleverly relates the structure of fairy tales to a part of life. One way or another, everyone in some aspect has had an introduction to an adventure—an adventure stage wrought with challenges and facing your fears, and finally, rising above it and living happily ever after. Thus, we have all experienced life in a Disney fairy tale.
There are nine chapters that make up the book, with the conclusion being Finding Your Happily Ever After. Chapters one to three focus on the author’s early years and challenges. Her stories of life in the school system are distressing, not only in the systemic sense of not fitting in, but also in the tales of cruelty by children. She talks of how quirkiness as a child soon turns into narratives of “abnormal” and “problematic.”
Chapters four to six revolve around finding her path, finding her tribe, mental health and anorexia, and her diagnosis. Hayden’s parents had placed her in 10 schools over an eight-year period, as she tried her very best to fit in. Eventually, she was diagnosed with autism and ADHD.
Chapters seven to nine then focus on how she came into being herself, taking care of her mental health, finding her supporters, and as Hayden would say, “finding her eye sparkles.”
In this precise portrayal of life through her eyes, the reader will be amused, shocked, disturbed, relieved, and inspired. Her sprightly personality shines though in her words, her spirit unbroken even as she describes being bullied, and battling anorexia, mental health issues, ostracism, and loneliness.
This book of lived experience, written in a charming literary style, teaches everyone to not judge those who do not follow the conventional patterns; why not just listen, compromise, and allow people to be themselves?
Chloé Hayden is an award-winning motivational speaker, social media influencer, and content creator. This proud disability rights advocate with lived experience penned this book specifically for the neurodivergent, yet in my reading of the text, Different, Not Less is a self-help book everyone can be inspired by: a highly spirited novel when you feel you are not on life’s true path.
Reviewed by Rebecca Wu
The views expressed in this review belong to the author and not Glam Adelaide, its affiliates, or employees.
Distributed by: Murdoch Books
Released: August 2022
RRP: $32.99
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