I used to say the phrase “The common denominator in all your failures is yourself” a lot, and always to myself. I’ve learned to be a little more gentle to myself since then, but the impulse to change what I do or what I say, or even fundamental parts of myself, is still there. It’s probably a good thing, then, that I don’t have the ability to wish myself back in time for a do-over like the heroine of Holly Smale’s Cassandra In Reverse, which starts as a quirky story about a woman trying to fix her life and ends up being an unexpectedly emotional story of self-acceptance.
Cassandra is having the lousiest day: her boyfriend just dumped her, her roommates are on the cusp of kicking her out, she just got fired, and when she leaves the office, she gets tangled up in a protest that results in her having a meltdown on the street. In her fervent wishing to undo the day, she finds herself restarting the awful Wednesday. What initially seems like a bizarre deja vu of one of the worst days of her life becomes an opportunity to rewrite history. The present? The future? Cassandra isn’t sure, but she’s going to try to do things better this time.
And it works! In a way. She can take back emails and say the right things to the right people at the right time. She goes all the way back to the start of her relationship with her boyfriend, though the challenge with that is that she’s trying to force what came organically before. What feels like overlapping timelines to her, she realizes late in the book, have resulted in a disjointed single timeline for those around her. Still, things are going well with her boyfriend, and she finds a new ally at work and betters her relationship with one of her roommates. But this whole do-over thing is exhausting, and there’s still the matter of the mysterious woman following her to deal with. Things are getting better for Cassandra, so why does it feel like she’s unraveling?
From virtually page one, Cassandra is clearly written as undiagnosed autistic woman, whose primary struggles of sensory overload and lack of patience with social duplicity are a particularly poor fit with her job in public relations and marketing. She knows she’s perceived as odd, but can’t understand why she’s not permitted her oddities when those around her do so many nonsensical things without repercussion. She hears other people wonder if she’s a robot rather than a person, among other things, and can’t help but internalize the shame about who she is. In the thick of her re-dos, she realizes, “I’m not traveling through time to undo the things I’ve done wrong or the decisions I’ve made. I’m trying to undo myself.”
Smale notes in her acknowledgements and bio that she was diagnosed autistic at age 39, and that she didn’t intend to represent autism or use Cassandra or herself to necessarily represent autistic people or the autistic experience. Still, the frustration Cassandra feels and the details of an undiagnosed neurodivergent struggling through a world clearly not built for her feels authentic. To my knowledge, I’m not autistic, but I did spend more than 30 years of my life as an undiagnosed neurodivergent feeling like I was the problem. Even now, with a diagnosis and treatment and my own journey of self-acceptance in my condition, it’s hard not to feel like the world does wish I’d undo myself in favor of something more “normal.” Reading about Cassandra, different though the details may be, was relatable enough that at times I had to pause my reading to heal from the ribbons I’d just been cut into.
Maybe that’s why I found the ending of Cassandra In Reverse so heartbreaking. To be clear, it’s supposed to be a largely happy, if somewhat bittersweet, ending: Cassandra learns, she grows, she accepts herself, she stops running from the ghosts of her past, and the future looks brighter than ever before. But a final decision brings abnegation to that acceptance. Meanwhile, the greatest sacrifice of those around her seems to be merely no longer expecting her to be an entirely different creature. As imbalanced as Cassandra’s relationships might continue to be, hers is still a captivating story about the benefits and costs of being able to do-over the rougher parts of your day, and about accepting yourself for yourself, no matter who you happen to be.
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