Mia’s Mum has found the worst kind of “advice” online and her telling Mia to, for example, hide her stimming, made me very sad & angry. I do really enjoy singing, I take part in a local show choir every week! I also, similarly to Mia, use music and headphones to get through noisy situations, such as travelling or shopping. I asked a few questions about SPEAK UP!Īre you as passionate about music as Mia? There’s also a sharable comic available on their contact page called UNDERSTANDING THE SPECTRUM that should be read by any adult that works with autistic young people. I thought including them was a good idea, but they would be more useful in a more clearly noticed location.Rebecca Burgess draws comics about their experience of autism and sexuality (check out HOW TO BE ACE as well), honestly and unpatronisingly for younger readers. The book includes trigger warnings on the copyrights page, but I didn’t notice them until I was finished with the book.

Either way, I really enjoyed this book and thought it was a satisfying and informative graphic memoir. But they packed a lot into this book so it might have been too much to also go into autism as well. I’m not asexual, but I am autistic, and I found myself wanting a bit more of a look into how the two overlapped for Burgess, or how they found them to be interconnected. It got across the intense societal pressures to fit in and get into a relationship that is in the background of almost all of our media, as well as broader family/interpersonal pressures. I liked that the book focused on the full scope of how complex life can be and how a bunch of different issues can affect someone deeply without anyone noticing. The art is expressive and full color, which I think in this case adds to the overall package.

I’d been following Burgess’s work for a while so was excited to see this book pop up on their Twitter, and it lived up to my hopeful expectations. It also covers OCD, anxiety, and touches a bit on autism, so it manages to cover a lot of ground in 208 pages. How to Be Ace is both a good coming of age memoir and a great primer of what asexuality is and how the social pressures to have sex and find a romantic partner can be very damaging. This is another winner from Jessica Kingsley Publishers, which I’ve become increasingly aware of in the last year as a great specialty publisher.

How to be ace rebecca burgess