A US-Filipina Psychotherapist’s Debut Memoir Is the Book Every OFW Family and Special Needs Parent Needs to Read
There is a scene near the beginning of this book that will feel painfully familiar to many Filipino families, especially parents raising neurodivergent children.
Irene Laturnas Velasco is at the boarding gate of NAIA with her husband, her mother, and her ten-year-old daughter Madison, who has autism, after a long and exhausting trip from the province. Madison begins to cry. The airport is loud, crowded, and overstimulating. Anyone who has cared for a neurodivergent child knows that look, when the body becomes overwhelmed before words can catch up.
Her family gathers around her quietly. They hold space. They wait for the moment to pass.
Then a male staff member approaches and says, “If she doesn’t stop, you will be offloaded.”
What struck me was not only the cruelty of the remark, but the way Irene tells the story. She does not write it for pity or outrage, even though she would have every right to. She writes it calmly, almost carefully, as someone who has learned how to sit with pain long enough to turn it into something meaningful. A week later, she writes a letter about what happened. Not for attention. Not to go viral. But because her daughter deserved dignity, and because maybe another family somewhere needed to know they were not alone.
That scene quietly sets the tone for Read More Post Less.
Subtitled A Filipino Father Who Had No Word for Empathy, and the Daughter Who Didn’t Need One, the book moves through Irene’s childhood in Negros Oriental, her years as an OFW in the Middle East, immigrant life in California, her work as a psychotherapist, and the daily realities of raising a neurodivergent child. It is memoir, reflection, and advocacy woven together without sounding forced or self-important.
At the center of the story is Irene’s late father, Jun Laturnas, a master electrician from La Libertad, a small town in Negros Oriental, who may never have used the word “empathy,” but understood it instinctively. He showed up for people quietly. He paid attention. He carried love in practical ways.
One of the book’s most moving insights is Irene’s observation that Bisaya has no exact equivalent for the Western term “empathy.” Yet her father practiced it more naturally than many people who speak about compassion endlessly online.
That tension between language and lived kindness runs through the entire memoir.
Some of the strongest pages involve Irene’s reflections on autism, particularly when she encounters the “Double Empathy Problem,” a theory developed by autistic scholar Damian Milton, arguing that communication gaps between autistic and neurotypical people go both ways. Not deficit, but difference.
In one scene, Irene is crying quietly at the kitchen table after reading about the theory. Her husband does not notice. Her mother does not notice. Then Madison walks in and immediately asks, “Mommy, are you crying?”
It is such a simple question, but it lands heavily because it quietly dismantles the old stereotype that autistic children do not feel deeply. In that moment, Maddie becomes the first person in the room to truly notice her mother’s pain.
As a parent of a neurodivergent child myself, those passages hit differently. You eventually learn that communication is not always polished or socially conventional. You learn to recognize care in quieter forms. Presence. Consistency. Attention.
That, more than anything, is what this book is really about.
What makes Read More Post Less work is that Irene never sounds like she is trying to teach readers how to feel. She simply tells the truth as she lived it, sometimes painful, sometimes exhausting, often tender, and trusts the reader enough to meet her there.
About the Author
Irene Velasco’s Read More Post Less is now available through major online booksellers, including Amazon and Barnes & Noble. Readers who wish to order directly or learn more about Irene’s psychotherapy practice, advocacy work, and upcoming projects may also visit her official website at irenevelasco.com.
