Some Body to Love

What happens when life doesn't go to plan? From the author of Running Like a Girl and Leap In comes a remarkable memoir about gender, body-image and the re-configuring of her own family

‘Today I sat on a bench facing the sea, the one where I waited for L to be born, and sobbed my heart out. I don’t know if I’ll ever recover.’

This note was written on 9 November 2017. As the seagulls squawked overhead and the sun dipped into the sea, Alexandra Heminsley’s world was turning inside out.

Alex’s husband had decided to transition. The news had been delivered while their baby slept quietly in the next room.

But this vertiginous moment represented only the latest in a series of events that had left Alex feeling more and more dissociated from her own body, turning her into a seemingly unreliable narrator of her own reality.

Some Body to Love is Alex’s profoundly open-hearted memoir about losing her husband but keeping a friend whilst bringing a baby into the world. Its exploration of what it means to have a human body, to feel connected or severed from it, and how we might learn to accept our own, makes it a vital, level-headed contribution to the incendiary debates on body-image and gender.