Some Body to Love, by Alexandra Heminsley
Kate Kellaway
KATE KELLAWAY
Some Body to Love By Alexandra Heminsley Chatto £12.99
It is hard to know where a story like this begins.
There is the day when Alexandra Heminsley looks at her husband’s complexion and, puzzled, asks, ‘Is that foundation you’re wearing?’
He, before slamming his way out of the house, lies protectively, saying it is sun cream. On another day, on a train, the same culprit – BB cream – falls out of his bag and there is a flustered moment as he smuggles it from sight.
But, as Heminsley acknowledges – she is an accomplished memoirist and knows a story may have multiple entrances – there is no trite beginning to her husband D’s journey.
When he tells her of his intention
to transition, they have a baby son (hard-won after rounds of IVF). And, at her darkest moments, Heminsley confesses to rage at the idea of D as an opportunist waiting for the baby he could not give birth to himself before conveniently ditching their marriage.
But, as the book proceeds, she overcomes this and rallies in empathetically militant defence, arguing that it is because of society’s intolerance towards trans people that it has taken D 40 years to nerve herself. And they are friends now – the best of friends, she wants to make clear.
It is important to stress that this is Heminsley’s story, not D’s. Her restraint is admirable yet tantalising. I longed to know how the story was developing from both sides, to hear more from D herself.
But this book belongs to the evergrowing number of writers’ cures – in which the writer’s self-help might also help readers. Heminsley has a heartening track record in this regard, as author of Running Like a Girl (2013) – about running when you are not obvious athlete material – and its sequel, Leap In (2017), about the bracingly therapeutic effects of all-year sea swimming.
Oddly enough, in the most memorable moment of Leap In, her husband’s wedding ring is stolen by the sea off Brighton beach. A portent, perhaps.
In the new book, she describes D as having ‘slipped away like shingle after a momentous tide’ and makes no secret of the extent to which she feels out of her depth. But she resourcefully turns crisis into writerly opportunity and explores what it is to live in a woman’s body.
She recounts her battering experience of IVF and admits to passing incredulity that anyone would choose to be a woman. There is also a gripping (alas, in more ways than one) subplot about being touched up by a drunk on a train. She prosecutes the man in question and loses.
About her feelings, she is an honest expert. Her writing is so compelling that the book is indecently easy to read – one can skip through her meticulously described angst at a carefree lick. All you have to do while she suffers is turn the page. She is most interesting on her less-than-universal plight and laments the absence of a ‘script’ for people in her situation. Her book is a brave start.
She is incapable of being dull, although there are stretches – including those about her adolescent growing pains and exercise regime – that read more like padding than as essential material.
But I understand the mission: her book is partly about the complicated challenge of befriending one’s body. Bodies can, and do, betray us – and she writes well about the toxicity of ideal images of women on Instagram.
Yet she does not pretend to relish her unwieldy postpartum body any more than she does the accompanying weight of grief – for what she is going through is a form of bereavement, after the death of the married life she had imagined.
She is critically astute about the oversimplifications involved in the body-positivity movement:
‘Was I expected to keep feeling better and better about my physical self until I died, a self-adoring 90-year-old in short shorts, a thousand filtered flecks of light dancing around my carefully maintained grey-but-not-quite-natural-grey hair?’