Review: This is Body Grief: Making Peace with the Loss That Comes with Living in a Body - Jayne Mattingly

Genre: Non-fiction, Disability, Self-help

Published: Penguin Life, March 2025

My Rating: 1/5 stars

This is Body Grief is a non-fiction book about disability and the titular concept, that I was truly excited about ever since its release. Once I got to it though, I found I could not have disliked it any more if I'd'tried... Unfortunate and deeply disappointed rant incoming.

What I liked:

What drew me to this book originally was the title. Body Grief as a concept is extremely valid, and I’m personally very familiar with it from both living with- and working with (people with) disabilities myself. I don’t think the concept itself is original to the author, but I do believe she coined this term, which I think is incredibly important in creating understanding and awareness of the topic. For putting a name to that alone, she deserves the single star I gave this book.

What I generally didn’t like:

In short; I strongly disliked the tone and prescriptive intent behind this book. The author choses a lecturing – if not preaching – tone, wrapped in pseudo-intellectual language and patronizing advice, with the intent to tell the reader how they should approach their body(grief). She presents herself as an authority, dispensing the one and true gospel wisdom on the subject, which she extrapolates from her personal anecdotes and lessons learned from experiences. I have several issues with this approach.

If there’s anything I’ve learned about (body)grief over the years, it’s how individual it is. There is no “one-size fits all” or “correct approach”. Body Grief is as personal and individual as the bodies it affects. It can therefore only be described and not prescribed and anyone attempting to sell their experiences as universal truth has fundamentally missed that point. Had Jayne Mattingly chosen to share her experiences and personal lessons in a memoir-style book, I would not have such a problem. In the form that it is currently, it feels deeply out of touch.

When you extrapolate from your personal experience and apply those to everyone, you risk coming across as extremely out of touch and privileged. This happened here too.

Not to downplay the hardships of the author, but the majority of her advice only works in very specific circumstances. Those being: a relatively mild disability/illness that is non-progressive and/or life-threatening, in a person with access to ample finances and health-care and has a strong support system around them. Unfortunately, that simply isn’t the reality for most disabled people out there.

Although the author does make a point to “acknowledge her own privilege” by stating that she has all of these resources, she fails to make the logical step that her advice is completely tone deaf and non-applicable to anyone in a different situation.

Again; had this been a memoir/personal account, I would have no problem with this. It’s the framing of preaching these things as a universal truth to everyone experiencing body-grief that is the problem.

What I personally hated:

On a final note, the central message of “trust your body, because it will always be on your side” is one I fundamentally don’t subscribe to. That applies to all its sister-messages like the fact that your body never betrays you – you just “perceive it as such”. As a cancer-survivor now working in cancer-care and longtime caregiver for family members with (terminal) neurodegenerative illnesses, I can tell you that bodily betrayal exists. Bodies break down, they betray, they abandon and they don’t always have our best interest in hand. Not acknowledging this and gaslighting people with serious disabilities into thinking “they only perceive their bodily betrayal” is disgustingly ignorant and insulting to me.

Overall, I can't recommend picking up this novel, unless you share the authors very specific circumstances outlined above, or are willing to approach this as a personal account, rather than a lecture. Unfortunately, with how it was written, I could not make that mental leap...

You can find this book here on Goodreads.