Some Body to Love by Alexandra Heminsley review: unflinching, breathless and solipsistic

There were no “lace panties that I didn't recognise”, writes Alexandra Heminsley on the lack of obvious clues to the impending break up of her marriage. Just a “growing distance between us”. There was indeed a second woman in her relationship, but this story doesn't go the way you might think. 

Rather, Heminsley's husband, referred to only as D throughout her new memoir Some Body To Love, was in the process of privately accepting their identity as a woman, and only acknowledged what was happening to Heminsley six months after the birth of their son, L.

In truth, a few clues were there all along, although clues is perhaps a problematic word to use with regard to a book that attempts to detonate assumptions around gender signifiers. Still, when they first met, D would often wear nail varnish and, as Heminsley recounts, seemingly without irony, adored housework. 

It was after the birth of L, however, that things started feeling properly unusual. Many new mothers discover their husbands can suddenly feel like strangers, rarely like Madonnas. Yet this is the image a bewildered Heminsley uses, with barely concealed bitterness, as D sits glowing and serene, feeding their son the milk Heminsley had laboured thanklessly to produce.

Heminsley is well known as a memoirist: her two previous books, Running Like a Girl and Leap In, explored how marathon running and cold water swimming helped her to love her body for its capabilities rather than attributes. 

Her husband's revelation, when it eventually came, gave her huge amounts of distress, but also a great new subject to write about. The problem, as she acknowledges, is that D's transition is not her story to tell. So instead she writes (again!) about herself, using her experiences of IVF, pregnancy and sexual assault to explore the often disorientating terrain of gender, bodies, femaleness and ownership in ways that open up a compassionate space for trans experiences, too.

For the first half, this approach works. She is good on how the weirdly passive nature of IVF rendered her body a “human box file carrying the decisions of multiple doctors” and how its chemical effects left her “distrustful of what was real and what was imagined”. 

A couple of months into her pregnancy, a botched Harmony test suggested she didn't share DNA with her unborn child, thrusting her into an agonising physiological no man's land until her maternity could be re-established. A month before L's birth, a man fondled her bottom on a train and his friends then challenged her version of events (the case ended up in court). 

She refused to feel shame over her postpartum weight gain, boobs so big her nipples would catch on door handles, but couldn't bring herself to love her new larger self either. Her anger at what she sees as successive physical violations is succinctly redirected against D. “You wanted to throw everything away for access to this life, these treats?” she rails, privately.