In which I missed book club, again

 As a follow-up to the excellent book club on Angela Chen’s Ace, the New England Aces group decided to have a second book club, this time on Rebecca Burgess’ graphic novel How to Be Ace. Due to library wait times, I missed this book club, and was able to pick up my copy from BPL a day or two after the book club. Go figure.

 

Before I get into the content on the inside of the book I must express my extreme professional displeasure with whoever copy edited the back cover. There are two paragraphs in the back cover copy. In the first paragraph, someone has laboriously hypercorrected all instances of singular they to be mis-conjugated, pairing them with the same verb forms one would use for “he” or “she,” leading to the formations “they gets older,” “they leaves school,” “they starts to wonder,” and “they doesn’t want,” all in one eye-searing sentence. The second paragraph of back cover copy is conjugated normally (“they navigate”), as is the author bio below. I’m sorry, but… what. Whomst. How? 

 

The actual book part of the book is pretty good. It’s a straightforward memoir that clearly illustrates the alienation and attempt to navigate societal expectations that many ace people experience, including the laborious attempts to logic out some kind of sense to the behavior we’re seeing modeled--a challenging task when the only feedback you get is people dunking on you when you get it “wrong,” with no ability to ask clarifying questions before going ahead and getting it wrong because most of the expectations you’re trying to figure out are so deep and so intuitive for other people that they can’t articulate them even (or perhaps especially) when you ask. It also chronicles the joys and challenges of finding out that there are words and theory and other people having better conversations out there that you can use to make sense of your experiences and the other people’s expectations, they can just be sort of hard to find. The book also talks about the author’s experiences with anxiety and OCD, and of the financial stress of navigating the Great Recession fresh out of school. I appreciated that the book talked frankly about Burgess’ mental health could affect how they think and feel about their asexuality--their self-image and their ideas about what they felt they had to do in various circumstances--but rejected the idea that one must have caused the other, and the unrealistic expectation that asexual people have to have no physical or mental health issues at all in order to prove that they’re “really” asexual. Burgess is only one person, and it’s all too easy to go through depictions of asexual people and bug out every time they fail to sufficiently reject a stereotype, so I am sure there are ace readers who will feel disappointingly un-represented by the introverted, socially anxious comics nerd depicted here. As someone with close ties to the introverted, socially anxious comics nerds community, however, I think the book did a perfectly fine job of illustrating how asexuality is not the dominant sexuality within that demographic, as well as gently highlighting how the sense of alienation caused by not sharing basically everybody’s interests in sex and romance can actively feed social anxiety, not the other way around. The depictions of sort of drifting out of conversational circles because you are just bored goddamn stupid but don’t want to, like, derail a conversation that’s obviously important to the people having it were probably the most relatable parts of the book to me, although overall it had a pretty high relatability factor given that I am also an introverted white AFAB ace person who runs in generally artsy/nerdy circles and I appear to have graduated college the same year. 

 

Anyway, overall it’s very cute, very readable, and has some important stuff to say about growing up and self-acceptance that apply even if you’re not ace. I do wish I hadn’t missed the book club.