Strange Bodies: A Fathers Story of Pregnancy and Loss

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Description

In 2020, artist Tom de Freston and his novelist wife, Kiran Millwood Hargrave, discovered they were expecting twins. But Kiran miscarried, and thus began a long journey to parenthood that saw the loss of six more pregnancies.

In this intimate, personal book, de Freston explores his experience of the losses in his artwork, searching for a way to make sense of his and his wife's grief. His search for understanding leads him to work by artists ranging from Titian and Francis Bacon to Braca Ettinger and Gerhard Richter, and deep into Ovid's myth of Orpheus. As the miscarriages mount and de Freston becomes ever more aware of the precarious and bodily experience that is pregnancy, he excavates the erotic charge of the male gaze, its yearning for connection, and the boundaries that exist between lovers.

Addressed directly to de Freston's wife, Kiran, Strange Bodies is an authentic and powerfully moving account of a loving relationship coping with the struggle of making new life that pulses with wonder and insight.

Reviews

Unlike anything I've read before... A profound and generous book about life's fundamentals - the prenatal state, the heartbreaking experiences of miscarriage the fragility and miracle of life - written in beautiful, poetic, polymathic prose -- Lucy Jones
A rare combination of breathtaking joy with deeply heartbreaking moments... A book about love and hope that transcends grief -- Pragya Agarwal
I was hollowed out by Strange Bodies and then put back together. A book full of love that makes you see what really matters, both in art and life. Clever, tender, completely compelling -- Ella Risbridger
Strange Bodies opens up loss and creation with generous, sensuous intelligence. The book is an intimate and loving record of an experience too often overlooked, and a revealing investigation into the mysterious ways that matter comes alive -- Caleb Klaces
Remarkable. A careful drawing-forth: art and interior landscapes mingle and the reader becomes wholly absorbed, emerging horrified, grief-stricken, uplifted and profoundly moved -- Helen Mort
Profoundly moving [and] full of wonder * Bookseller *

Author Bio

Tom de Freston is a visual artist based in Oxford, and the author of Wreck: A Story of Art and Survival (Granta 2021). Among various fellowships and residencies he has held a Leverhulme residency at Cambridge University, a Levy Plumb Residency at Christ's College and the inaugural Creative Fellowship at Birmingham University. His work is regularly exhibited, and is represented in numerous public and private collections. With his wife, the writer Kiran Millwood Hargrave, he is the co-creator of Orpheus and Eurydice and Julia and the Shark, winner of the Waterstones Children's Gift of the Year.