I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes by Emily Farris is a memoir about being a femme-presenting individual who was diagnosed with ADHD later in life (3.5/5 stars)

I’ll Just Be Five More Minutes by Emily Farris is a memoir about being a femme-presenting individual who was diagnosed with ADHD later in life.

I really appreciated several parts of this book, because I found them very validating and I related to them a lot. I definitely am a bit of an “intense” person, there are times in which I hyper-focus on tasks, and I also struggle with executive dysfunction at times. I also really identified with the whole concept of people telling you that you’re not living up to your “potential,” and I too was part of the “talented and gifted” program in elementary school. I was also probably misdiagnosed with bipolar disorder in college when I actually had ADHD (I’m still sorting that out).

I enjoyed the author’s prose. She is quite funny and there were several essays where I laughed very loudly out loud.

However, there were a few things that I felt were a bit lackluster. Perhaps the most repeated thing in the memoir are references to her poor financial decisions, and she often leans into self-deprecation. I wish the author took a little bit more responsibility for those actions, instead of blaming it on her ADHD. There were also several essays included in this book that didn’t really seem to circle back around to being ADHD.

In the time between when she wrote the book and it was published, she and her husband divorced. Based off this memoir, I was not surprised that relationship did not work out, because they seemed to have a major issue with communication. Some of the essays she wrote about her marriage made me feel uncomfortable.

I definitely think that if you are a femme-presenting individual who has been diagnosed with ADHD at a later age, or if you think you may have ADHD but have never been diagnosed, this could be a helpful read for you. There is a Notes section at the back of the book that is basically a bibliography of a lot of helpful sources that you can use to dig deeper into this topic.

I received a complimentary review copy from Hachette Books. All opinions contained herein are my own.

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