I’m posting as part of today’s We Need Diverse Books campaign. You can find more posts on the campaign’s Tumblr and follow the hashtag on Twitter.

I learned about the world through fiction.

I didn’t know, when I was a kid, that I was on the autism spectrum, or that I would grow up to be asexual. I just knew that I was different. I knew I didn’t understand things that other people understood. I knew that other people didn’t think the way I thought. And even though I wouldn’t start thinking about sexuality for years to come, I had a vague premonition that I was different in that regard too, whenever I saw boys and girls proto-flirting on the playground.

Looking at the world straight-on left me overwhelmed. Talking to people left me bewildered. But words – words were my domain. They translated a world that was written in a language I didn’t know. They taught me how other people thought, and how they related to each other, and what they were like.

But there were things books didn’t teach me.

For one thing, they didn’t teach me about people like me.

I remember the lightning stab through the heart I would feel whenever I stumbled upon a character I could relate to. I would read the book over and over, trying to inhale it through my pores. I would try to force it on my perpetually unbookish friends. “Mom,” I would say, as if I had come fresh from a mystical vision. “This person is like me.”

It didn’t happen very often.

I got older. I learned about myself, discovered how to name my differences. I went to fiction to find reflections of myself, to find a map that would show me where I belonged in this world, and came away with empty hands – or worse than empty. Of the autistic characters I found, most of them were barely more than a collection of symptoms taken straight from a reference book, and either they were embarking on a heartwarming journey of becoming less autistic (don’t get me started), or they existed solely as someone else’s inspiration (including the reader’s) or as a challenge for a non-autistic character to overcome. Of the asexual characters I found… well, one was a convicted murderer, and one was a self-centered brat. Needless to say, neither one found true love.

I want to read books that tell me that people like me can be heroes. People who do the things I do and think the way I think and love the way I love. I want books that reflect my own experiences. Books that tell me I can obsess over strange things and rock when I’m happy and scream at loud noises and still be a fully realized human being in my own right. Books that tell me I can live happily ever after with the love of my life without ever swooning over his hotness. I want books that tell me the things that make me who I am are more than just problems to overcome, or bits of flavor in someone else’s life.

But that isn’t the only thing that books didn’t give me.

Stories shape how people see the world. That’s what they did for me. People will assume, on a subconscious level, that the stories they read reflect the world they live in, even if it isn’t true. And what happens when they don’t see people who are different from them? What happens when all they see are negative or stereotypical portrayals of differences? (To use one example: A lot of autistic people complain about the portrayal of the main character in Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. A lot of non-autistic people, on the other hand, gush about how this book helped them to understand autism. I’m sure most people who differ from the norm in some way can think of a similar case. That stereotypical portrayal that left you with a “this is me/this isn’t me at all” sense of cognitive dissonance. That book or movie that makes you silently gnash your teeth whenever someone brings it up, or tries to tell you how much it helped them understand “people like you.”)

Stories shape how people see the world – but this is a double-edged sword. If we’re shown a world in which everyone is the same, then that’s what we’ll see.

And while I want to see myself reflected in the books I read, that’s not all I want. I want to learn about all ways of being, not just the ones that are most common. I want to read about lives and experiences that give me that shock of recognition, and I want to read about perspectives I’ve never considered before. I want to expand my view of what it means to be human, and what it means to live in this world. I want to see the world as it is, in all its infinite diversity.

Both these things are equally important. But right now, all too often, the books I read don’t give me either one.

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Watch the We Need Diverse Books Tumblr if you’re interested in reading more diverse books – tomorrow people will be sending in their book recommendations, and on Saturday we’ll try to show there’s a demand for diverse books by buying them ourselves and encouraging others to do the same.

If you’re interested in my own portrayal of autism in fiction, my short story “Flight,” available in this free anthology, retells the story of Beauty and the Beast with two main characters on the autism spectrum.

  Kea’s Flight by Erika Hammerschmidt and John C. Ricker remains my favorite book about autistic characters. (As a bonus, it also contains an asexual character who is neither obnoxious nor a murderer!) My thoughts on this book are too complex to be summed up in a couple of lines, but you can read my gushing Goodreads review here.

  Finally, “Difference of Opinion” by Meda Kahn is a short but powerful story about an autistic woman in a science-fiction world.