4 stars
A fantastic look at one person’s experience with mental health and asexuality.
I will say this book took me a bit to get into. Based on the title and subtitle, I was expecting a focus on being ace. However, the book deals much more heavily on living with OCD and anxiety. This is great and shows the complexity of people but if you’re going into it with the expectation based off the punchy declaration of the title, it seems a bit longwinded.
Having said all that, by the end I loved this book. The reader follows Burgess through a lot of uncertainty, confusion, anxiety, and pressure, but there is such an uplifting and empowering message to the ending that it makes the whole journey worth it. It feels as though the reader grows along with Burgess.
As a character, I didn’t really relate to Burgess. The story-telling is fairly straight-forward without much depth into the other characters. It’s very much a memoir focusing on her own experiences and feelings. Again, this is fine; it just took me a bit longer to get into the book because of that.
At the end of each chapter is an informative comic providing information such as broadly what asexuality is, the difference between sexual and romantic attraction, a bit of insight into the spectrum of asexuality, and media representations. There is also a resource section at the end with websites and book recommendations.
Overall, this was a helpful look into the intersectionality existing within a person, including being ace, having OCD and anxiety, and while it isn’t explicitly addressed in the book, being on the autism spectrum. Following Burgess’ discovery of asexuality and her journey demonstrates just how important it is to have such representation in mass media – so people know there are others like them, that they aren’t weird or broken, that they aren’t alone as well as to correct misconceptions and humanize ace experiences.