As she sets off to start university, she makes a promise to herself: This goes about as disastrously as you might expect, and Georgia is left wondering what in the world is wrong with her. In seventh grade, a girl in her class told her she had to like someone, so Georgia picked the most conventionally attractive boy out of a yearbook photo. All she has to do is work out who to kiss, since she’s never actually had feelings for anyone at her school. So Georgia decides: she will have her first kiss that very night, she will complete this rite of passage, and she will formally leave her naïve childhood behind. When she admits in a truth-or-dare game that she’s never even been kissed, this sparks ridicule, pity, and confusion from her classmates. The novel begins with protagonist Georgia sitting in the middle of her high school graduation party pondering that she’s never been in a relationship. While Loveless is not the first YA novel to feature a protagonist on the aro-ace spectrum(s), the degree to which its plot centres on the aro-ace experience is significant.
Oseman brings this thematic undercurrent, this resonant philosophy, to a head in her 2020 novel Loveless-a coming-of-age story explicitly about the protagonist’s journey to identifying proudly as aromantic asexual, and about unpacking the assumptions that romance and sex should take the spotlight in a story about relationships. It could be said that the overarching philosophy of this body of work is that friendships deserve the same narrative attention and the same emotional weight as a romantic plotline would. Even without taking this textual representation of the asexual spectrum into account, however, the central focus on glorious, detailed, complex friendships rather than romances makes Oseman’s novels very welcoming to aro-ace readers, and very resonant with their experiences. By the end of Radio Silence, Aled identifies himself as demisexual, using the word on-page. While there are romantic subplots in these books-often featuring friends of the protagonist or other members of the ensemble casts, and often admittedly very fun-Oseman’s protagonists are rarely motivated by romance. I Was Born For This, Oseman’s next novel (published in 2018), follows a different narrative and relationship arc to Radio Silence, but similarly centres on an unexpected yet wonderful friendship-this one between an ordinary fangirl and the anxious frontman of a world-famous band. Radio Silence, true to this mantra, keeps its focus on the platonic relationship between narrator Frances and her new best friend Aled, weaving a story about the life-affirming, life-saving potential of friendships and the intimacy of creative partnerships with nary a whisper of romantic nor sexual tension between them. You probably think that Aled Last and I are going to fall in love or something, because he is a boy and I am a girl. The cover of her debut Solitaire informs the reader “This is not a love story” and there is a portion in Radio Silence where the narrator all but breaks the fourth wall to confirm:
#Alice oseman radio silence series#
And when they do feature aro-ace identity directly, the quiet revolution is front and centre, and the results are incredible and incredibly important.Īside from the wildly popular and wonderfully sweet comic series Heartstopper, the majority of Oseman’s stories do not centre on romance-instead having their emotional centre be friendships. As I kept my eye on Oseman’s forthcoming novels, it transpired that this revolution sits at the heart of her writing, making them deeply resonant for aro/ace readers even when not featuring the identities directly. But to imply that you could be in love with someone in a purely platonic way? That you could refer to something as a love story even if it was about characters who were “just” friends, who never even thought about dating one another? It was a little bit revolutionary.īut that, of course, is the revolutionary heart of aromanticism and asexuality-the quiet, but resonant, revolution inherent in the articulation of different kinds of love, in the deconstruction of the dominant social narratives of romance and sex. Friends could say they loved each other, of course, in a fleeting and fluffy sort of way. It was the first time I had seen those words put together to such an effect.
When I reached the passage quoted above, I stopped in my tracks. In 2017-somewhere on the stumbling journey to identifying myself proudly and loudly as asexual-I read Alice Oseman’s young adult (YA) novel Radio Silence. “You are.” He stretched out his arm and patted me on the head. He laughed again and hid his face under the blanket.
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