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Some Body to Love
- A Family Story
- Narrated by: Alexandra Heminsley
- Length: 7 hrs and 1 min
- Categories: LGBTQ+, LGBTQ+ Studies
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Summary
Brought to you by Penguin.
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 9th 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.
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- rhunter
- 16-01-21
Simply put, superb.
I love Alexandra Hemingsley's 'Running like A Girl', so I pre-ordered this. I can't express how much it has spoken to me and how much it means to me. From the struggle with fertility (no spoilers here), and sexual assault, to her relationship with her co-parent, she views it all through the lens of her body. I am entirely pro trans rights, but have struggled at times to articulate this, especially to women in different generations to me. Hemingsley's careful, thoughtful analysis, drawing on her own experience, lays bare the experience of becoming and being a woman and how one chooses to represent themselves. I am a lawyer, so reading about Hemingsley's experience with the criminal court system was equally elucidating. Thoughout the book, she does not shy away from her white privilege and considers this in line with each of her experiences, noting that the body positivity movement has in many ways been appropriated by white women. She highlights that it should not be confused the frustrating images of slim white women on instagram looking 'perfect in their imperfections'. I could talk all day about this book, and will do with the people in my life.
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