There’s a good book in here, but it’s struggling to get out.

The author has surveyed and interviewed a bunch of “a-spec” people and their responses are interspersed with the text, but there’s not enough to get a sense of who they are. I want to hear their stories as they tell them, not have them sprinkled as standalone quotes in a narrative set by the author. (And some of the survey methodology seems quite shoddy or poorly described.)

I found myself skimming what the author had written to get to the quotes, but I gave up about a third of the way in – I’d rather read from these people directly, not their repackaged words.

I wanted this to be the ace version of Gender Euphoria, but it falls far short of that. I wanted to hear about asexuality fits into people’s wider lives, how it affects being a parent or a partner or whatever, but I didn’t get that.

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