Alexandra Heminsley: Some Body To Love

‘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. She’d just been told her then-husband was going to transition. The revelation threatened to shatter their brand new, still fragile, family. 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 gaining a best friend, and together bringing up a baby in a changing 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 and inspiring contribution to some of the most complex and heated conversations of our times.

‘A brave, thoughtful and timely book — calming and inspiring on our different relationships with our bodies, and vitally compassionate on trans rights.’ Naomi Alderman

‘Insightful and wise, generous and kind.’ David Nicholls

‘A book about how a personal crisis caused someone to open up rather than shut down… really admirable and carefully done… on bodies, families, gender identity, bravery.’ Amy Liptrot