Please Don't Hug Me

✍ Scribed by Kay Kerr

• Publisher: The Text Publishing Company
• Year: 2020
• Tongue: English
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

The most stressful interactions for me are ones like this, where the person's face says one thing but their words say another. Which one am I supposed to believe? Faces seem to be more truthful, but people always act as though their words are the only things that matter.

Erin is looking forward to schoolies, at least she thinks she is. But her plans are going awry. She's lost her job at Surf Shack after an incident that clearly was not her fault, and now she's not on track to have saved enough money. Her licence test went badly, which was also not her fault: she followed the instructor's directions perfectly. And she's missing her brother, Rudy, who left almost a year ago. But now that she's writing letters to him, some things are beginning to make sense.

Kay Kerr's Please Don't Hug Me depicts life on the cusp of adulthood—and on the autism spectrum—and the complexities of finding out and accepting who you are and what's important to you.

Kay Kerr is a former journalist and community newspaper editor from Brisbane, now living on the Sunshine Coast with her husband and daughter and working as a freelance writer. Kay was writing the first draft of Please Don't Hug Me, her first book, when she received her own autism-spectrum diagnosis.