Burgess adds a lot of facial expression, and uses the imagery to good effect when representing the psychological impact of anxiety or isolation. Most pages are split into several panels with a combination of speech or thought bubbles and captions in something more like a retrospective narrative voice. I’m not a very visual person, and I lack the vocabulary to describe or analyse Burgess’ art style in any detail but the cover image gives a good idea of how the rest of the book is presented. As well as asexuality, the memoir covers issues around neurodiversity: there is discussion of anxiety, OCD, stress around eating and the experience of going to therapy Burgess is also autistic, although this isn’t mentioned explicitly in the text. (For this reason, the book is particularly good at showing that asexuality doesn’t necessarily entail a lack of romantic attraction or desire to be in a relationship, and that people who are ace can be in same-gender or different-gender relationships.) Burgess also explores common misconceptions and pressures around asexual identities, some of which are akin to those faced in other parts of the LGBT+ community – such as being told you’re too young to know your own identity or that you haven’t found the right person – and others which are unique to asexual and aromantic people. As the subtitle suggests, this is a memoir covering Burgess’ childhood (feeling different from everyone else in class), time at art school and university, and the subsequent stressful period of trying to find work during a global recession, and they discover their own asexual identity along the way, through failed and successful romantic relationships with people of different genders. This makes a book like the graphic memoir How to Be Ace: A Memoir of Growing Up Asexual by illustrator Rebecca Burgess (who, judging from the blurb and author bio, uses they / them pronouns) all the more important. In this context, many people have no idea that asexual / aromantic identities exist, and struggle to understand either how their own feelings might place them on the ace spectrum, or what it means when people around them come out as ace.
Ace identities receive very little representation in the media, and there have been some notable cases of TV shows with characters who initially seem to have no interest in sex or romance (and are consequently often embraced by ace communities as representing their experiences) but are subsequently reframed as being sexual and romantic, with no discussion of asexuality. Asexuality and other ace identities (such as aromantic and demisexual) are frequently misunderstood and often excluded from LGBT+ communities and spaces.
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