Now separated from her husband, Top Gear presenter Paddy, Christine McGuinness, 34, has made a powerful documentary about what it’s like to be female, on the spectrum – and misunderstood.
At the tail end of 2021, Christine McGuinness — former model, Real Housewife of Cheshire and wife of Top Gear presenter Paddy — made a BBC documentary, Our Family and Autism. For the first time, the couple opened up about the experience of parenting three autistic children, twins Leo and Penelope, then eight, and five-year-old Felicity.
Until the age of four, Leo and Penelope were almost entirely nonverbal. When anxious or overstimulated, they would make high-pitched trilling sounds or flap their arms. Leo displayed obsessive behaviour, such as spinning the wheels on his toy cars, while Penelope would become introverted. Both were highly anxious about new experiences. The Christmas after they had turned two, Christine did not put up any decorations because the lights and unfamiliarity of a decorated house would unsettle them.
The pandemic exacerbated the challenges as, with huge disruption to their routine, all three children regressed during the lockdowns — with their sleep, with reading, with food. After years of speech and language therapy, their verbal skills regressed too, and Felicity developed a stutter for the first time.
In the documentary, Christine and Paddy discussed how getting a diagnosis for all three — at the age of four for the twins and three for Felicity — had enabled them to better help their children, and their hope that, by making it, they might help other families faced with similar challenges.
One unexpected outcome of making the film, however, was Christine herself receiving an autism diagnosis at the age of 33. As part of their exploration of the subject, both she and Paddy were asked to fill in a questionnaire designed to elicit responses that indicate autistic traits. Neurotypical people generally score between 15 and 17 out of 50 (Paddy scored 17); she scored 36.
McGuinness was sanguine and not at all surprised. She always knew she was different, she says, had always felt she didn’t fit in and was “a loner who never had friends” — but she admitted that she “thought I’d hidden it better”.
Since then, much has changed for the McGuinnesses. The twins are now almost ten and are making measurable progress. “They’re doing so much more than I ever thought they would,” says Christine. “They were completely nonverbal and now they’re having conversations. Things that years ago I never thought could happen — getting a job, driving a car, possibly living independently one day and having a relationship and a family… Now, I wouldn’t rule anything out for these kids.
“We’ve just had half-term, and I used to dread it,” she says. “Any kind of break in their routine used to panic me. But this time they really enjoyed it and were quite calm.”
But the most dramatic shift of all has been for McGuinness herself, who says that her own diagnosis has “changed my life for ever”.”It set me on a mission to find out who I am,” she says. “I’ve played that many roles in life and not really known which one, or which part of it, was me.” She feels, she says, that she has “faked a lifetime”.
And now she’s made a follow-up documentary, this time about herself: Christine McGuinness: Unmasking my Autism. I tell her how much I enjoyed it and how much I learnt from it. She doesn’t know quite how to take this casual compliment. “When there’s someone that I don’t know, or I’m nervous about speaking to, I’ll practise starting the conversation with some kind of compliment,” she says. “So with everybody who’s watched my documentary saying, ‘Oh, it’s amazing,’ I can’t help but go away thinking, ‘I wonder if they really meant it?’ I’m never sure.”
McGuinness is masterful at what is known in autism as “masking” — learning, practising and performing certain behaviours and suppressing others to appear more like the people around them. Today we’re in a small, chilly anteroom off a photo studio in east London, and McGuinness, now 34, could not seem more at ease. She is warm, engaged and highly articulate. But there’s nothing spontaneous or remotely relaxed about her, she says.
“I sit up all night overthinking. I rehearse conversations, I repeat conversations. I’m always trying to second-guess what someone is going to do or say.” It is, she admits, “exhausting”, yet she cannot understand how anyone can possibly have a social interaction they haven’t fully rehearsed. “But the major change is accepting all that, and accepting my ups and downs and the way my mind races,” she says. “I used to just think I was mad, whereas now I understand. It all makes sense these days.”
The acute pressures of parenting three autistic children and the strain it inevitably puts on a marriage was made abundantly clear in the first documentary. For the first few years of their children’s lives, the family were practically housebound. In an interview in October 2021, Paddy told me that he and Christine had rarely been out together since the children were small, as they couldn’t leave them with anyone overnight. “Christine’s mum can manage the odd night, but usually something goes wrong. I can count on one hand the nights out we’ve had together in the past five years,” he said. The family have been on holiday just once in almost a decade, and preparations involved weeks of Christine taking the children to an airfield to get them used to the noise of aeroplanes. Then, when they arrived in Majorca, she remembers “when they saw this massive beach for the first time, the fear in their eyes. Most kids would get excited. Mine were like, ‘What the hell is this?’ "
Paddy was diagnosed with clinical depression and, he told me, had seen a therapist, which “helped me out massively”. But there were other pressures too. In 2018, he was pictured arm in arm with the former All Saints singer Nicole Appleton. Christine was “devastated” but was determined to keep the family together — “I wanted my children to have a dad at home” — so “said nothing” and, “We just got on with married life.”
Then, in July 2022, claims surfaced of other infidelities. A week later, the couple confirmed they had split up and had, in fact, been “living separate lives” for some months.
Getting an autism diagnosis has, she thinks, given her a better understanding of herself and her relationship. “I have stayed in a place where I was probably unhappy because it was safe, and I don’t like change,” she admits.
They’d been together since she was 19 and Paddy 34. “I’ve had this man in my life for 15 years. I can’t imagine being with anybody else. I don’t know what it’s like to date; I can’t remember what it’s like to be single. I am going into a new chapter on my own, which is petrifying for someone who doesn’t like change.”
But, she says, “I’m proud that I have made a decision and stuck to it – for once. That’s not easy for me to do. But I always want to lead by example, to show my children that Mummy is independent and works.
“I want them to know that when they are older and in a relationship that it needs to be a loving, happy relationship and no one should stay where they don’t feel that it’s 100 per cent right,” she says. “I did, because there were times when I was really happy and I wanted to keep the family together.”
The couple continue to share the family home to minimise disruption to the children and they also share childcare, allowing both of them to work with no need for extra help. But Paddy is entirely and noticeably absent from the documentary.
My attempt to ask any further about the domestic arrangement is rapidly shut down by a publicist hovering nearby. I try to ask about new relationships too, but am once again prevented. McGuinness, however, responds with a sly grin and a wink, which I take to mean she is, at least, exploring some options.
Resilience is something she’s never been short of. Born in Blackpool, a year after her elder sister, Christine was just one when she crawled over a needle discarded by her heroin addict father, prompting her mother, who was still only 20 years old, to leave him and move back to her native Liverpool. Christine grew up on a council estate with her sister, then a younger brother, while her estranged father spent time in and out of prison. Even then, she says, while her siblings played together, she was “a bit of a loner” and would not join in.
Though she was bright, she struggled at school, particularly senior school, “the worst time of my life — to the point where I didn’t want to live”. She had physical outbursts, would scream and shout, throw chairs in the classroom and push tables over.
One of the discoveries McGuinness made in the making of the documentary was that the timing of her outbursts, in the first few years of high school, is common among people with autism. “When I was in my primary school I was OK. I was comfortable. It was a really small school, just one teacher.” Then, she says, “You have to move on to a senior school where you’re thrown into a bigger classroom. You’re moving about everywhere, you’ve got a timetable, you’ve got a different teacher for every lesson, different pupils in each class. For most children that’s difficult, but for autistic children that’s when the signs and symptoms seem to really get out of control. Certainly for me, that’s when I struggled.” That transition, she discovered, combined with the onset of puberty, is for many autistic children “the perfect storm”.
Dismissed as naughty and disruptive, McGuinness left school at 14 and, encouraged by her mother, entered (and won) local beauty pageants, which led to modelling. She found she was good at it and enjoyed having a call sheet every day, detailing all the information about the next day’s job. “I knew what I was doing and where I was going.” And she was comfortable playing a role. “I didn’t have to be me, so I wasn’t going to be judged on being me.” She realised, she says, “the power of pretending”.
She is far from alone. Realising this power and unconsciously harnessing it is one reason that, according to experts, autism in women and girls has gone largely undiagnosed until recently. Like McGuinness, many autistic women and girls are highly skilled at masking and, when they do present neurodiverse traits, because these look different from those recognised in boys they are frequently misdiagnosed as having social anxiety, personality disorders or bipolar disorder. The impact of this misdiagnosis on their mental health is huge; autistic women are 13 times more likely to commit suicide than neurotypical women.
Even the “gold standard” diagnostic test for autism, the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule (ADOS), was created in 1989, before any extensive research had been carried out into female autism. There are up to an estimated one million autistic people in the UK, among them a huge rise in adult women now seeking a diagnosis.
Researchers at King’s College London have been working to improve diagnostic testing to help spot traits and symptoms specific to women, including in friendships and romantic relationships in which they can be particularly vulnerable. Autistic women, they say, can find reading cues and signals difficult (as well as detecting lies and cheating; McGuinness says she still struggles with the concept of gaslighting) and can find themselves in situations they had not consented to be in.
According to the researchers, nine out of ten autistic women and girls will have experienced rape, sexual abuse or domestic violence at some point. “And I’m obviously one of that number,” says McGuinness. From the ages of 9 to 13 she was groomed and sexually abused by a friend of the family, who would make her watch violent and sexually explicit videos with him, talk about masturbation and take her to the beach, then force her to travel home naked.
“Now I know that’s because he was a paedophile,” she says flatly.
At 13 she was raped at a party by a boy from school. She blamed herself for being drunk and, when she reported it to a counsellor at school, “She said I must have got it wrong.
“I experienced all that and I didn’t speak up,” says McGuinness. “And I used to question if it was because I was autistic. Was I an easy target? I was quite soft and I was a loner, always on my own — did they know that I didn’t have a big group of friends to go and talk to? Was it me? Would a neurotypical woman have said something? Is it my fault? How did I find myself there?”
Even her consensual relationships before her marriage were, she says, “all pretty bad experiences”. When she met Paddy, “I felt very safe. I wonder if that’s why I stayed in that relationship for 15 years. I know being a single woman, a single parent, is a very vulnerable place to be and it absolutely petrifies me.”
She was nervous, she says, of including such dramatic and disturbing statistics for fear of alarming girls or their parents. “But it doesn’t mean that this is going to happen because your daughter’s autistic, or your sister or your mother or whoever. It’s just to say: please be aware of how easily led autistic girls can be and how vulnerable we can be, how easily manipulated we can be,” she says. “Most autistic girls want to fit in and they want to be like the cool girls — so they may be more swayed to do things that they might not actually want to do.”
Even now, she says, she finds it hard to make and maintain friendships. “I meet people and maybe swap numbers, maybe keep in touch for a couple of weeks, and then it’ll kind of falter and I don’t keep it going,” she admits. “It’s the making it last that I really struggle with. I don’t reply to people. I didn’t realise that you have to put dates in with friends or you won’t see people. But I am trying to socialise.”
Shortly after the twins were born, the family moved from Paddy’s native Bolton to a leafy, well-heeled corner of Cheshire, beloved of footballers and celebrities. “I used to feel like I had to look a certain way, like I had to be bossy and glam and wear bright colours and sequins because I lived in this really affluent area where everyone had money and drove amazing cars and lived in fantastic houses – and I’m from a council estate,” she says. McGuinness’s “power of pretending” came into play once more. She played the role so perfectly in fact that, for several years, she joined the cast of The Real Housewives of Cheshire.
Since the diagnosis, though, she’s been in the process of “shedding” vestiges of that identity “and trying to figure out what my new one is”. That has meant a mass wardrobe clear-out – local charity shops have benefited from a serious de-sequinning of her closets – “And my really long hair extensions that I used to have, they’ve gone. Binned. I can’t believe nobody said to me, ‘They look terrible,’ " she says with a laugh. “I’m trying to get back to my normal self, who I was before all this, the cameras and the TV shows. It’s been very cleansing, clearing my wardrobe and just toning everything down, stripping back. I feel a lot more like myself again.”
And she is actively trying, she says, “not to pretend, not to try to fit in, but that means showing yourself and, for somebody who doesn’t really love themselves, that’s hard. It’s easier to pretend.” Why doesn’t she love herself? “Because I still feel a bit mad.” She laughs heartily. “Because I still feel very different. Me — real me — is very different. I’m not very confident. I question everything. I wonder why I’m here. If I showed you all my insecurities, I’d never get the job done. We’d still be down there now on the photoshoot.”
As an adult she no longer has meltdowns, but she will have what she calls “shutdowns”. “I tend to let things build up. If I have too many jobs that I haven’t kept on top of — whether I’ve got to return a parcel or pick up the children’s prescriptions or make an appointment — it builds up and gets on top of me. Then I’ll sit in silence and I probably won’t answer the phone for a few days or call anybody.
“I’m convinced at the time that it’s perfectly normal behaviour,” she adds, “and if anyone ever said to me, ‘Come out of your room,’ or, ‘I haven’t heard from you for two weeks. Where are you?’ I’d think, why’s everyone bothering me? But it’s a shutting down. And I only realise later.”
As a teenager, McGuinness was diagnosed with anorexia and even now finds most food unpalatable. Since receiving an autism diagnosis, however, she believes she never had body issues but, as with her own children and many other autistic people, it is her sensory issues with food that make eating difficult.
At school, the chaos of the dining hall combined with food smells — she is hypersensitive to both noise and smell — meant she simply avoided eating all day. When she began modelling staying slim was applauded, so she did not attempt to address the issue. Although she is now trying to branch out and eat a greater variety of food — for example, pasta with a small amount of sauce — her mainstays remain beige, bland and dry. “Bread, cheese, pasta, toast, chips, mashed potato, roast potato – any kind of potato – Yorkshire puddings. There’s a beige food cookbook in the works,” she jokes.
Culinary publishing may be some way off yet but she has just published her first children’s book, Amazing You, Amazing Me, in which all the characters are autistic. “There are different signs and symptoms with each character because I wanted to show how big the spectrum is,” she says. “I’ve got three children all with one diagnosis, but they’re all completely different and I wanted to show that.” And, she says, it’s for all children, not simply the neurodiverse. “Autistic children reading it will feel more included in a book, which is lovely, but it is also for neurotypical children to read and ask their mummy or daddy, ‘Why doesn’t that child like spaghetti?’ And then the mum can say, ‘Well, because they don’t really like wet things.’
“I want to help educate. And I want my children to grow up in a world that truly understands them,” says McGuinness. “There are places that are getting more autism-friendly — that will do an autism hour or an autism day where they’ll turn the music down, turn the lights down a little bit, let fewer people in — and we want more of that.
“The world is changing slowly,” she says. “And that’s incredible to see. I think people understand now that being autistic is not just Rain Man. And for my children it will be even better when they’re older.”
In the meantime, she says, “I want my children to be proud of me. I want to feel like I’ve achieved something. I want to find my purpose.” I think she might be the only one who can’t see that she has clearly already found it.
Written by: Jane Mulkerrins
© The Times of London