A review by wardenred
How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual by Rebecca Burgess

emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

Whoa, weird. There's an actual word for how I feel? Does that mean I'm not just really broken??

I loved a lot about this book: the art style, the thoughtfulness, but mos of all, how viscerally relatable I found a lot of the author's experience. That one moment of fake-gushing about the Gravitation manga? OMG, literally been there! And there was an anime based on it, too, and my friends were so sad that it never properly showed the "hot scenes," so I pretended to be sad, too, even though *whispers* I absolutely didn't care, I was in it for the drama, and whether the drama was "hot" and "sexy" or not was irrelevant.

Also: that entire feeling of being the odd one out, then finding your crew of fellow weirdos, and still being the odd one out when it comes to romance and sex. The conviction that everyone else finds these things just as hard at the beginning and everyone is pretending they're as interested in sex as the movies and books tell us to be, and then the realization that no, actually, everyone else is dead serious. Waking up with headaches after night-long anxiety attacks. Connecting to people through text role-playing games. That huge epiphany of finding a word that means who you are. So much stuff, big and small, that made me nod along as I read, because yeah, I've been there too.

What I weirdly didn't like were those educational snippets at the end of each chapter. On one hand, they're great and useful and I agree with what's said in them! On the other hand, with a title like this and with how the book looked generally, I expected it to be aimed more at fellow asexuals, and instead it kept turning into an after school special that was like, "Hey, allo people, here is what you need to know about us." That vibe occasionally creeped into the regular chapters, too, and there was something... idk, awkward about it? Especially since some of those additions were rather heavy-handed, and one was factually wrong. Aromanticism is a separate identity and not part of the asexual umbrella. There are plenty of allosexual aromantic people, just like there are plenty of alloromantic ace people! Romantic and sexual attractions can be wholly separate, and the book does actually spell it out, but still somehow shoves aro people under the ace umbrella.
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