Re-storying ADHD: Lived Experience, Agency, and Self-Understanding in Tom Newlands’s Only Here, Only Now

Abstract

The novel Only Here, Only Now (2024) portrays Cora Mowat's bildungsroman, depicting her experiences of impulsivity, forgetfulness, restlessness, sensory intensity, emotional volatility, and difficulty with everyday tasks before she comes to understand ADHD. The paper draws on Critical ADHD Studies, particularly the framework developed by Andrew Ivan Brown, Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, and David Jackson-Perry, which challenges deficit-oriented accounts of ADHD. The framework is also used to emphasise situated knowledge, experiential knowledge, agency, and the re-storying of ADHD to help analyse the novel. The paper argues that Only Here, Only Now moves from a deficit-based interpretation of Cora's behaviour toward an account in which she becomes an increasingly authoritative interpreter of her own experiences. Her later recognition of hyperactivity and impulsivity does not create a new identity but provides a framework through which experiences that have already shaped her life can be reinterpreted. The novel thus enacts the Critical ADHD Studies project of re-storying ADHD by shifting authority from external interpretations of behaviour toward situated and experiential knowledge.