Heart of Felt: How Jim Henson’s Muppets Taught Me to Be a Person

How did you learn to be a person? Aimee was taught by a man she never met: the beloved puppeteer Jim Henson. He was the guy behind—or, rather, beneath—the Muppets, and he gave millions of children the building blocks of literacy, numeracy, and the nuances of human behaviour. But to Aimee—a 37-year-old Autistic journalist and film critic—Kermit the Frog and his foam-rubber associates are much more than kids’ stuff. They are powerful ciphers for the human condition.

Heart of Felt: How Jim Henson’s Muppets Taught Me to Be a Person is a hybrid biography, travelogue and offbeat hero’s journey across America, into the collective unconscious. A rollicking work of narrative nonfiction, it charts Aimee's pop cultural pilgrimage to the USA, where she traces the ongoing significance of Henson’s life and work—from Sesame Street and Fraggle Rock to the Muppets proper and beyond. After six weeks alone on the road, she realises the trip is really a side quest on a much longer journey to learn that she's Autistic.

Examining life and art through a neuroqueer lens, Heart of Felt redefines what it means to come of age. The work-in-progress manuscript has been supported by grants from Creative Australia, CreateSA and the Neilma Sidney Literary Travel Fund. Extracts have been longlisted for the CRAFT Memoir Excerpt & Essay Contest, and highly commended for the Next Chapter and the Writer’s Space Online Fellowship for Writers with Disability. In 2025, Aimee received the Jerra Studio Fellowship for Writers with Disability and a CreateSA Fellowship to continue working on her debut book. She is actively seeking representation and welcomes contact from agents.