Slash the Image

So, after a number of years on multiple waiting lists, I have my autism diagnosis

I don’t really know how I’m supposed to feel about it, but there’s a lot of “oh… that explains everything” and a lot of relief that I’m not a bad or broken person.

I spent a long time thinking I was wrong somehow - cold, lacking empathy, too intense about the “wrong” things. It turns out my brain just works differently.

Right now I mostly feel... buffering. Numb, but not in a bad way. Like my system is quietly re-sorting years of memories with new labels.

I’m not ready to be insightful or inspirational about this. I just wanted to say it out loud.

I wasn’t a psycho. I was autistic, without the information I needed.

A Bit of a Stretch is funny, furious, and quietly devastating in equal measure.

Written as a diary of Chris Atkins' time in prison, the book is sharply observational and often laugh-out-loud witty, even as it documents a system that is chronically underfunded, overcrowded, and casually cruel. The humour never blunts the reality; instead, it makes the injustice land harder.

Atkins is particularly good at capturing the small, grinding absurdities of prison life - the bureaucracy, the petty rules, the boredom - and showing how they erode people over time. What makes the book so effective is its refusal to sensationalise. Violence is not the point here; degradation, neglect, and indifference are.

There's a clear awareness of the author's own privilege and the ways it buffers him from the worst excesses of the system, and that self-reflection adds weight rather than defensiveness. The book is angry, but it's also humane, empathetic, and deeply concerned with how easily society accepts cruelty once it's hidden behind walls.

The only reason this isn't a full five stars is that the diary format can occasionally feel repetitive - though that repetition arguably mirrors the reality of incarceration itself.

A compelling, important read that manages to be entertaining without ever losing sight of the human cost of prison.

One of the things The Time Hop Coffee Shop does particularly well is sit with nostalgia without romanticising it.

Nostalgia is seductive. It smooths edges. It filters memory through warmth and familiarity, making the past feel safer than the present. We remember how things felt, not how they actually were - and even then, we remember only certain feelings. The ones that comfort us. The ones that reassure us that there was a time when things made sense.

But comfort is not the same as happiness.

In The Time Hop Coffee Shop, the chance to revisit the past isn't framed as a gift without consequence. Returning to old moments doesn't magically restore joy or fix what went wrong. Instead, it exposes something quieter and more unsettling: how easy it is to confuse “I miss this” with “this was good for me.”

There are moments in our lives that glow in hindsight because they belong to a version of ourselves that felt younger, more hopeful, or more certain. But that glow often comes from distance, not truth. When we look closer, the happiness we think we're remembering is threaded with anxiety, exhaustion, compromise, or unspoken hurt. Those things didn't disappear - they were just edited out of the highlight reel.

The book gently suggests that nostalgia is less about wanting the past back and more about wanting relief from the present. When life feels uncertain, heavy, or unkind, the past becomes a refuge - not because it was perfect, but because it's finished. Nothing new can go wrong there.

And yet, revisiting the past doesn't offer the safety we expect. It can't give us the things we didn't know to ask for at the time. It can't make people behave differently, or turn near-misses into fulfilled dreams. What it can do is show us how far we've come, and how much we survived without realising we were surviving at all.

What I loved most about The Time Hop Coffee Shop is that it doesn't shame nostalgia. It understands why we cling to it. But it also refuses to let nostalgia pretend it's happiness. The book treats memory as something to be acknowledged and honoured - not something to live inside.

Because happiness isn't a place we can return to. It's something that has to be built, slowly and imperfectly, in the present we're standing in now.

Sometimes the most meaningful thing the past can offer us isn't a second chance - it's permission to stop chasing one.

There's a particular kind of grief that Every Heart a Doorway understands instinctively: not the grief for something that died, but for something that *was real* and is now unreachable. A world that fit. A version of yourself that made sense. A door that opened once - and then closed.

Seanan McGuire doesn't treat portal fantasy as escapism. She treats it as truth. The children who come back from their doors aren't delusional or confused; they're bereaved. And the cruelty of the so‑called real world isn't that it doubts their stories - it's that it insists they should be fine now. That they should move on. That whatever made them *whole* somewhere else was a childish phase, best forgotten.

That insistence is where the harm lives.

Nancy's grief is quiet, bone-deep, and constantly misunderstood. She doesn't express her pain in ways that make adults comfortable. She doesn't soften it, decorate it, or rush toward recovery. Instead, she carries it with her - the stillness, the restraint, the refusal to pretend she wants what the world expects of her. And for that, she is punished.

What struck me on this read was how much of that punishment is rooted in gendered expectations. Nancy's refusal to be warm, expressive and compliant - her resistance to the emotional labour so often demanded of girls - is framed as a problem to be solved. She is cold. She is difficult. She is wrong. The school exists to help children who've returned from impossible worlds, but even there, the pressure to become legible, palatable, *normal* seeps in.

Normal, in this book, is not neutral.

Normal is enforced.

McGuire is especially careful - and radical - in how she writes asexuality. Nancy's asexuality isn't a puzzle, a symptom, or a phase to be corrected. It's simply part of who she is, as intrinsic as her longing for the Halls of the Dead. Yet it's precisely this refusal of expected desire - romantic, sexual, reproductive - that places her further outside what the adults around her are willing to accept.

There's an unspoken rule in our world that healing looks like reintegration. That recovery means wanting what you're supposed to want. That if you don't crave the right things - romance, ambition, domesticity, forward momentum - then something must be broken in you.

Every Heart a Doorway quietly but firmly rejects that.

The children who found their doors didn't escape because they were weak. They escaped because those worlds *recognised* them. Some needed logic, some needed chaos, some needed rules, some needed blood and shadow and endings. None of those needs is treated as lesser. None are pathologised — until the children are forced back.

That's where the real violence happens.

The book keeps circling one devastating idea: that being forced to abandon the self you were allowed to be is a form of trauma. And that pretending otherwise doesn't make it kinder - it just makes it lonelier.

What makes this hit especially hard is how familiar it all feels. You don't need to have walked through a literal door to recognise the shape of this grief. Many of us have known spaces - identities, communities, ways of being - where we were briefly, astonishingly at home. And many of us have been told, explicitly or implicitly, that those selves were unsustainable. Unrealistic. Inappropriate. Something to grow out of.

Queer people. Asexual people. Disabled people. Neurodivergent people. Anyone whose existence disrupts the tidy story of what a life is supposed to look like.

We're often asked to trade authenticity for acceptability. To sand ourselves down until we fit back into the world that never quite wanted us.

McGuire doesn't offer easy comfort here. The doors don't reopen on command. Not everyone gets to go back. Some losses remain permanent. But what the book does offer is recognition - and the insistence that this grief is real, that it matters, and that refusing to "get over it" can be an act of truth rather than failure.

There's something profoundly compassionate in a story that says: you were not wrong for loving that world. You were not broken for wanting to stay. And you are not obligated to desire the life you were handed simply because it's the only one currently available.

Some doors close.

That doesn't mean what was on the other side stops being part of you.

And maybe the quiet, radical hope of Every Heart a Doorway is this: that even when the world insists on normalcy at all costs, there will always be people - and stories - who understand the cost of that insistence, and who will sit with you in the grief of what almost was.