Alexandra Heminsley’s previous books – Running Like a Girl and Leap In – established her as a cheerful advocate of exercise, encouraging women to overcome hang-ups about how they look in order to realise its benefits. In her new memoir, she finds her own relationship with her body complicated in ways she could never have foreseen.
Heminsley is certainly not short of material. In just a few years, she struggled through a hellish experience of IVF that included being mistakenly told that the baby inside her did not share her DNA, leading her to fear that the wrong embryo had been inserted, a sexual assault on a train while pregnant that went to trial, and the axis-tilting experience of her then-husband transitioning. In the very early stages of motherhood, Heminsley found herself unwittingly married to a woman. All of this contributed to an unsettling lack of agency over her own body and sense of womanhood, which forms the narrative of Some Body to Love.
It’s a gawp-worthy series of events, but Heminsley’s highly readable account is generous, calm and thoughtful. Although she and her partner, here called simply D, broke up, they have remained close. Heminsley is bracingly honest about how difficult this situation was, but nonetheless proves big-hearted in her ongoing affection for D and her attempts to understand why D kept such an enormous part of herself hidden. There is rage at this deception – Heminsley writes of “fury at how I had been duped” and how “very Handmaid’s Tale it felt on the blackest nights”, wondering if she’d been used “merely as a vessel for reproduction”. But there is also empathy with D, and a peppy determination to learn from it all: “This strange and lonely period opened up the world, opened up my outlook and opened up my understanding of what beautiful variety we are all capable of.”
Heminsley comes to understand D’s secretiveness in the context of societal pressures and prejudices, and, in its latter parts, Some Body to Love argues cogently for greater openness and understanding towards different gender expressions. Heminsley attacks the idea of a “required biology for entry to womanhood”, drawing an interesting equivalence between undergoing IVF and transitioning: “I had taken oestrogen, I had undergone surgeries, I had manipulated nature in order to live the life that I felt would be the very best. How could I now expect a different standard from others?”
But finding herself part of an LGBTQ+ family also meant being thrust into a peculiar and vicious culture war, with trans people cast as some kind of folk devil. Heminsley’s indignation at the rhetoric of columnists – some of whom she once considered friends – who now stoke the “trans debate” is righteous, but dignified.
Such context obviously adds a timely charge to this part of Heminsley’s story, but her description of her bewildering experience of IVF is also page-turningly compelling. Less successful is a section in which Heminsley charts her lifelong relationship with her body, from teenage joint pain to the pernicious influence of Instagram. This feels like an unnecessary digression, digging backwards rather than digging deeper.
Presumably she didn’t get permission – or didn’t want – to write about D’s experience. And fair enough. But the relentless focus on her own body, with so little space for what D was going through, leaves the book feeling structurally off-kilter. Heminsley offers little of what their relationship, their break-up, or their communication was really like. Did D want to stay with her? How did D react to Heminsley’s certainty that she wasn’t gay and so couldn’t stay married to a woman? How does D manage being on the sharper end of the public transphobia they encounter as a parent?
Of course, D hasn’t chosen to make a living from autobiographical writing, and Heminsley doesn’t owe her readers these insights. But that doesn’t change the fact that their absence can make this book – insightful and compassionate as it is – feel a little one-sided and navel-gazing.
• Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley is published by Vintage (£14.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
