Kay Kerr is a former journalist and newspaper editor from Brisbane. Her debut novel is the widely acclaimed Please Don’t Hug Me.
Social Queue introduces us to Zoe.
Zoe has Autism and that means her everyday can be tough. Social spaces aren’t designed for her and this forces her to navigate a world of noise, bustle and crowds that leaves her exhausted. Worse, people just expect her to be ok with these things and that adds another layer of exhaustion as Zoe must choose to explain her discomfort or hide until she can feel safe.
But now Zoe’s finished school and landed her dream internship at Bubble, an online media company. After the hell of high school, this is Zoe’s chance to greet life on her terms.
And her first story pitch is a huge success!
Dating was a non-event for Zoe at school and when she writes about all the missed opportunities, she’s overwhelmed with likes; including a few secret crushes.
Zoe embarks on a fact finding mission. By talking to each of her secret crushes she’s hoping to piece together exactly how love and dating is supposed to work and who knows, maybe love is still on the cards with someone?
There’s a moment in Social Queue where Zoe is trying to figure out why things can’t just be a bit easier for her, and she talks about the social model of disability. The social model of disability is a theoretical framework that respects people’s individual differences and identifies disabilities as the product of barriers in society.
When a wheelchair user requires the modification of a ramp, it’s no different to a non-wheelchair user requiring the modification of stairs. We’re all trying to get to the next level, it’s just some of us have the privilege of having barriers removed without us even being aware of it.
In Zoe’s case she has to puzzle over the potential cues and signals she missed from crushes. Her life at school was a swamp of sensory overload and bullying that meant she didn’t have the emotional energy for much else. But now as she revisits old friends and even bullies who claim they really liked her she must negotiate the toxic world of what we do, or say we do, in the name of love.
Zoe is an extraordinary character to travel along with as she takes this journey. Kerr’s writing is such that we feel instantly connected moving from her internal to external world effortlessly. As Zoe meets up with friends, bullies and passing acquaintances we are confronted by the ways that we all try to negotiate love and affection. There’s a particularly effective scene where a old crush describes a series of innocuous actions he took to get her attention. She is baffled, as I suspect you would be too dear reader, that somehow these amounted to a declaration of love. Zoe may have missed the cues, but the question we all are left asking is how anyone ever falls in love if we’re going to be this obtuse.
The reader's connection with Zoe is of the type that we might feel that we relate to Zoe’s experience. This felt deliberate on Kerr’s part. Our closeness to Zoe invites us to share and relate to her experience but also challenges us to recognise that these are barriers thrown up against her as an Autistic person (Zoe’s preferred language).
Throughout the novel Zoe works with her colleagues at Bubble, as well as with friends and her newly discovered old crushes, to educate them about the way disability is framed in society. We see the real emotional burden she shoulders and the toll it takes on her.
Social Queue invites us into Zoe’s world and gives us privileged access to her life. We see her triumph and also her suffering but are asked to understand not pity.
