Carry On Expectations 2
Experiencing Asexual Representation in Carrie Pilby, the book
Back in 2018, I watched the film Carrie Pilby, a 2017 adaptation of Caren Lissner’s chicklit/YA book Carrie Pilby. You can read my thoughts on that film and the asexual representation (or lack thereof) right here.
It’s taken me until the beginning of 2024 to get around to reading the book itself. If you’ve taken some time to read my thoughts on the film, I’m about to repeat a little bit of information on the background of the book’s publication. It was originally published by Red Dress Ink in 2003 and then republished by Harlequin Teen in 2010. As I learned from exploring the book’s publication history in a little more detail, it turns out that it was originally published as chicklit in the vein of Bridget Jones’s Diary and later republished under a YA imprint. According to an interview with Lissner, only minor changes were made between the Red Dress Ink and Harlequin Teen editions.
The thing that stood out to me most from reading the book was that the word ‘asexual’ is mentioned on page multiple times. Given that the book was published in 2003 and republished in 2010 and that the film didn’t bother to keep even the possibility of queerness, I was surprised by this. Though ‘asexual’ as a term was around and used when the book was originally released, it wasn’t widely accepted or, more importantly, known and yet Carrie Pilby, for all its microaggressions and 2003 understanding of what asexuality is, is a distinctly asexual reading experience. As one of the first publications available, the barrage of aphobic commentary, the lack of understanding that asexuality is a spectrum and that aromanticism is something else, and the focus on Carrie finding her way into society (through conforming to allocisheteronormative standards) is understandable. Frustrating as a modern aspec reader, but contextually understandable. The asexual storyline in Shortland Street (appearing from 2007–2010) has similar issues.
Whereas Shortland Street aims for a sympathetic portrayal, however, Carrie Pilby uses the asexual aspects and themes present to explore the ubiquity of allosexuality in society without seeming much regard for Carrie as a person who isn’t interested in sex and what this means for her. It also isn’t particularly interested in exploring the way that Carrie is strongly autistic-coded, likewise using this coding as a way to explore aspects of how American (and to varying degrees Western) society functions rather than who Carrie is as a person. She’s a vehicle rather than a character.
There is, of course, nothing automatically wrong with this approach. It’s a clear mismatch between the book’s intended audience and this reader. It’s not an approach to storytelling I particularly enjoy and so aspects of the book that may work wonderfully for (aspec) readers who mesh with it better while they failed for me.
That said, I do believe that the book would have been stronger if it had leaned more into exploring these aspects of Carrie’s character in more depth as it would have strengthened the points it was using them to make.
I finished the book a short while ago, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about and how I wanted to explore my thoughts. I don’t think Carrie Pilby set out to be an asexual book, but since it wanted to examine society’s interest in sexuality and, in particular, the intersection between sexuality and morality, it wound up leaning into a bingo card of microaggressions that asexual people encounter. I would go so far as to say that the book does not attempt to offer a counter to these microaggressions despite the fact that it attempts to draw attention to their importance in society. In the end, the book falls firmly within the early asexual tropes of someone on the outside of society needing to be brought into it through the power of sex and romance and whether Carrie herself experiences either of these feelings is irrelevant.
Every now and again, I see queer spaces return to a discussion about who you are versus what you do. The narrative of Carrie Pilby reminded me of that because, ultimately, the lack of focus on relationship dynamics and the book’s failure to build up a romantic subplot for Carrie to explore result in no one’s, not just Carrie’s, actual experiences with sex and romance mattering: what matters is going through the motions and conforming. What matters is what you do.
(As an aside, in light of this, it is interesting then that the film adaptation adds a clearer, conventional male love interest for Carrie to start dating by the end, and ditches Carrie’s bisexual friend Kara entirely. The film isn’t able to erase Carrie’s asexual coding entirely, but it certainly scrubbed the book of every speck of queerness it could.)
The book, at least for me, never quite managed to move away from that sense that asexuality — and insofar as it engages with it aromanticism — are things for Carrie to look at and ‘fix’. Or at least try before deciding they’re not for her. The story of a 19-year-old genius having to find her place in society, having to explore in her first job and early 20s what many explore when she attended university because she was too young (and too neurodiverse) to share the interests of her peers can be an incredibly powerful one, as I think can be seen from the fact that I initially quite enjoyed the film and connected with it in part due to some of those dissonances.
The way the book tells them, however, felt like a struggle. Once the microaggressions start, they pretty much don’t stop. I spent most of this book wanting to put it down because dealing with those unchallenged assumptions in a book that was attempting to challenge them was exhausting. I’m curious what I would have made of the book if I’d read it when it’d come out or when it’d been republished. I recognise that part of my frustration does stem from the fact that I have seen books handle these same microaggressions, occasionally just as many of them, with more grace and more empathy. Some of that is because these books are often ownvoices for aspec experience and some of that is simply that as people have written (and read) more books and as our collective understanding of asexuality and aromanticism has grown, contemporary depictions have more depth and nuance. I expect that a version of Carrie Pilby written today would spend more time examining the issues that frustrated me so much solely because it is more obvious now that they need to be examined and, perhaps more importantly, that we have a better understanding of how we should examine them.
Ultimately, I think Carrie Pilby is a relic of its time. It is ahead in the fact that it explicitly explored asexuality at all rather than leaving it to the single, dismissable mention I expected. And make no mistake it does explore asexuality. For all the book’s flaws, asexual traces, themes and aspects are central to the book. It would never age well when our understanding of asexuality in the 21 years since it was first published has grown and expanded as much as it has.
