Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley

Published by Chatto and Windus

Available from all Good Bookshops and Online

What They Say

‘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.

What I Say

Not that you all know, but this is actually my first blog review of 2021. I am sat in my dining room typing away, listening to the radio, with a cup of coffee to the right of me, and am very pleased to be able to be sitting upright to type this. Why is any of this remotely relevant to my review?

As I sit here typing this, I am currently recovering from Covid. Being able to read has not been possible for a few weeks, as the amount of energy required to pick up a book and read was way beyond my capabilities for a while. The thing is, I am so very pleased that I chose Alexandra’s book Some Body To Love, because her writing about her relationship with body and her life experiences could not have come at a better and more appropriate time for me, as mine was taken over by a virus that I had been trying so hard to avoid.

Alexandra’s book starts off making you believe it is heading in one direction, but when you start to read it, you realise that it is in fact epic in its scale, and certainly for me, made me think about not only what Alexandra has been through, but also how we view our own bodies and often internalise our own experiences.

When Alexandra married the love of her life, they decided after a time to try IVF, and it seemed like Alexandra was going to have the family life she longed for. However, things in her marriage had not been going well, and initially she believed it was due to the immense pressure the couple were under as they tried to get pregnant. In fact, her husband had decided that now he wanted to transition, and Alexandra was left reeling by the decision. Coupled with the fact that they had gone through immense emotional distress during her pregnancy when there was doubt that the embryo that had been implanted was hers, Alexandra was devastated. The idea of a cosy family unit was no more, and Alexandra had to determine what this meant for her and their son as they were now facing a very different life to the one she had anticipated.

This is not just a book about Alexandra’s marriage, or the reality of someone transitioning. Some Body To Love is profoundly affecting as it goes so much further and is also Alexandra’s candid and intensely personal memoir about her relationship with her body. She explains how when she was heavily pregnant, she was sexually assaulted on a train, and the immense pressure this put on her as she decided to press charges against the man. It is unbelievable to see the way in which she is treated, and the way in which her pregnancy is used against her by the defence.

What always seems to be in Alexandra’s mind is the importance of making her voice heard, to show people that this behaviour is not acceptable, and the way in which she is treated by some people as simply nothing more than a pile of pregnancy hormones is shameful.

At the centre of this book is always Alexandra’s relationship with her body, and how we are all complicit in how we present ourselves and react to others too. I am endlessly fascinated by the power and lure of Instagram, and the pressure that we are under to conform and be seen in a certain way. Alexandra writes so incisively about how even when you try to work within the seemingly open image of body positivity, that there are still ways in which it is seen as acceptable to do so. I loved the story of how Alexandra was meeting journalists to promote her book Running Like A Girl, and even though she wanted to present an honest and natural face to show people her real self, she was not deemed newsworthy until she adhered to the narrative that other people wanted to create for her.

I think that this is such an incredibly honest book that should start so many conversations about the realities of motherhood and parenting, the narratives we create for ourselves, and most importantly of the realities of what it means for someone to transition.

Hand on heart, I have had no experience in my life of anyone I know deciding to transition, and I had no frame of reference to understand the massive personal and emotional demands this has on both the person who is transitioning and those closest to them. I was also astounded by the misconceptions and attitudes of other people who projected their own thoughts and opinions onto an incredibly personal situation, and I think it is testament to Alexandra’s incredible resilience and empathy for her husband that you see how they adapt their family life to their new reality.

I finished Some Body To Love last week, and am constantly thinking about it. As a reader, Alexandra’s accessible and absorbing writing made me feel that it was as if she was sat next to me telling me what has happened in her life. I feel very privileged to have read it, and know that my knowledge and understanding of my own personal experiences, my relationship with my body and what it means for someone to transition have changed as a result of reading this book.

It is a raw, visceral and an incredible testament to the power of love and family, which permeates every single page and makes you feel hopeful about the world once again.

Thank you to Lucie Cuthbertston-Twiggs for my copy in exchange for an honest review.