Meg Eden Kuyatt: Of Broken Dolls and Girls in Walls (Autism)

Scholastic, to be published May 20, 2025

While shopping in an antique store years ago, I found a picture I haven’t been able to stop

thinking about. It was a sepia photo of a young white girl with the words “Our Broken Doll”

written on the bottom in pencil.

As an autistic person, I sometimes feel like a broken doll in light of society’s expectations. I

wonder sometimes if that’s what people think of me. Like my protagonist, V, I love how I am uniquely made, but can doubt and be made to feel small.

I wonder if I was born in a different time, or to less supportive parents with fewer resources, if I

would be cast aside by society. If—like many autistic people in the past—I would’ve been

institutionalized at an asylum or sanitorium. If—like many autistic kids now—I would’ve been

sent to a behavioral modification program promised to “fix” me. Would people treat me

differently if my autism presentation was less “convenient” or neurotypical-passing, or if I

couldn’t hold down a job and concretely “contribute to society?”

These are some of the fears and questions that fuel The Girl in the Walls.

When I wrote Good Different, I wrote very literally and directly about my feelings. I was overstimulated, so I wrote poems about feeling overstimulated. I tried this same approach at first with The Girl in the Walls but quickly found the feelings too painful and difficult to stay in grounded reality. I needed to hit them at an angle (“tell it slant,” in the words of Emily Dickinson), and I needed something beautiful and strange to lift me out of the ugly. This led me to discover, with V, the ghost-girl living in her grandmother’s walls.

Through the ghost, I could unload my heavy, awful feelings. I could express how powerless I can feel. How my feelings can take over and tell me lies. Like V, I have to constantly remind myself that feelings, while important, are not always reliable narrators. While people I love can hurt me, they can also love me and have their own fears and insecurities and many sides.

In a time where our news and media are quick to capitalize on ugly divisive feelings, tell one-

sided stories, and oversimplify reality, I think it is more important than ever that we have stories that remind us of the complexity and nuance of the people around us. In a time when hatred seems at an all-time high, we need to practice and model listening, empathy and SEL—for ourselves, and the kids in our lives. I know I needed these reminders—that’s why I wrote this book.

I hope that The Girl in the Walls makes readers feel seen, but that it also makes all of us slow

down and pause in our assumptions of others. That we will take time to listen to each other’s

stories, and even if we don’t always agree or understand, that we will respect the messiness and nuance. That we can see those around us—and ourselves—as strange and beautiful.

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Meg Eden Kuyatt teaches creative writing at colleges and writing centers. She is the author of the 2021 Towson Prize for Literature winning poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” and children’s novels, including a 2024 ALA Schneider Family Book Award Honor, “Good Different,” and the forthcoming “The Girl in the Walls” (Scholastic, May 2025). Find her online at megedenbooks.com.