Irene Laturnas Velasco and I are both from Negros Oriental. She grew up in the town next to mine, and long before we became close we already shared many common friends and stories. She is friends with my older brother and cousins, too. But strangely enough, it took adulthood for us to really find each other.
Maybe that is just how some friendships happen. You spend years going to the same places and communities, and then life finally introduces you properly.
I became friends with Irene long before she moved to the United States where she married her husband Angelo Velasco. Years later I officiated at their second wedding in Boracay attended by close family members and friends. Over time we discovered how much overlap exists in our lives: the constant negotiations required by adulthood, motherhood, advocacy work, and raising neurodivergent children while trying to remain functional ourselves.
I try to see her whenever I visit the United States, if schedules allow. So reading Read More Post Less did not feel like reading the memoir of a distant author; it felt more like listening to someone in a conversation we have been having for years.
For me, the personal connection matters because this is not the kind of book you can skim or bluff your way through.
Not only as a therapist
Subtitled A Filipino Father Who Had No Word for Empathy, and the Daughter Who Didn’t Need One, the memoir moves through family history, immigrant life, motherhood, psychotherapy, and autism advocacy without sounding clinical or self-important. Irene writes as a therapist, yes, but also as a daughter, mother, immigrant, and exhausted human being trying to make sense of the emotional worlds that people carry around.
Part of what gives the book its weight is that Irene is not writing from a distance. She specializes in identity, mood disorders, life transitions, and imposter syndrome in her psychotherapy practice in California, but the book never reads like a lecture disguised as memoir. The authority comes from lived experience. She understands the emotional terrain she is writing about because she has walked through much of it herself.
The emotional center of the memoir is her late father, Jun Laturnas. Early in the book, Irene points out that in Bisaya and many other Filipino languages, there is no exact equivalent for the Western clinical term “empathy.” But her father did not need a formal word for it. He practiced it instinctively through presence, attention, and quiet acts of care. Through long walks in worn slippers. Through grease-stained hands fixing things. Through taking note of people without needing recognition for it.
That distinction feels especially important today, when so much public compassion has become performative.
One thing I appreciate about the memoir is that Irene does not romanticize hardship. The scenes from Negros feel lived-in and specific. There is dust, exhaustion, embarrassment, financial strain, and emotional contradiction. She resists turning poverty or resilience into inspirational theater—and the book is much stronger because of that restraint.
Mutual rather than one-sided
The memoir becomes particularly compelling when Irene writes about autism and the “Double Empathy Problem,” a theory developed by autistic scholar Damian Milton arguing that communication difficulties between autistic and neurotypical people are mutual rather than one-sided. In one of the book’s strongest scenes, Irene sits emotionally drained at the kitchen table when her daughter Madison walks in and asks plainly, “Mommy, are you crying?”
It is such a simple moment, but it challenges the long-held assumption that autistic children do not feel deeply or connect emotionally. Madison notices something many adults would probably miss, or avoid altogether.
As a mother of neurodivergent children myself, I read those phrases differently. Not academically. Personally. Parents of neurodivergent children eventually learn that communication is not always verbal, polished, or socially conventional. You learn to pay attention differently. You stop measuring love through performance and start recognizing it through presence, consistency, and emotional honesty.
That, more than anything else, is what this memoir is really about.
What stayed with me after finishing the book were, not the frameworks or theories, but the seemingly ordinary moments. A father silently paying attention. A daughter asking a direct question. A mother learning to look up from performance and simply staying present.
Read More Post Less will resonate deeply with immigrants trying to reconcile multiple identities, parents raising neurodivergent children, caregivers carrying invisible exhaustion, and readers increasingly weary of curated empathy online. It does not offer dramatic revelations or easy viral wisdom. What it offers instead is quieter and more difficult: the reminder that real attention requires patience, humility, and the willingness to remain emotionally available in a world constantly telling us to look away. CS
“Read More Post Less” is available through online booksellers Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Those who wish to order the book directly or learn more about Irene Laturnas Velasco’s psychotherapy practice, advocacy work, and upcoming projects may visit her official website at irenevelasco.com.
