Strange Bodies | Granta

  • Published: 02/05/2024
  • ISBN: 9781783789894
  • Granta Books
  • 256 pages

Strange Bodies

Tom de Freston

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.

De Freston began exploring his experience of the losses in his artwork, searching for a way to make sense of his grief and of his wife’s. He finds representations of his feelings towards Kiran in Ovid’s myth of Orpheus, who, in turning back to gaze upon Eurydice, loses her to the Underworld; a story which captures the longing for closeness within a couple, and the intense pain in the distance between them. His search for understanding leads him to artists and artworks from Titian and Francis Bacon to Braca Ettinger and Gerhard Richter. And as the miscarriages mounted and de Freston became ever more aware of the precarious bodily experience that is pregnancy, he excavates the erotic charge of the male gaze, its yearning for connection, and the desires and boundaries that exist between lovers, and between painter and painting.

Addressed directly to De Freston’s wife Kiran, Strange Bodies is an intimate, authentic, and powerfully moving account of a loving relationship that pulses with wonder and insight.

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

The Author

Tom de Freston is a visual artist based in Oxford. 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-author of Orpheus and Eurydice and Julia and the Shark. Wreck is his debut non-fiction work.

More about the author →

From the Same Author

Wreck

Tom de Freston

Artist Tom de Freston has long had an obsession with Géricault’s painting The Raft of the Medusa, and the troubling story behind its creation. The monumental canvas, which hangs in the Louvre, depicts a 19th century tragedy in which 150 people were drowned at sea on a raft lost in a stormy sea, when the ship Medusa was wrecked on shallow ground.

When de Freston began making an artwork with Ali, a Syrian writer blinded by a bombing, The Raft’s depiction of pain and suffering resonated powerfully with him, as did Géricault’s awful life story. It spoke not only to Ali’s story but to Tom’s family history of trauma and anguish, offering him a passage out of the dark waters in which he found himself.

In spellbinding, visceral prose, de Freston opens a window onto the magnetic frisson that runs between a past masterpiece and contemporary artistic endeavours. He asks powerful questions about how we might translate violence, fear and trauma into art, how we try to make sense of seemingly unthinkable acts, and the value in facing and depicting the darkest horrors.

Tom de Freston on Granta.com

Essays & Memoir | The Online Edition

The Fire

Tom de Freston

A fire breaks out in Tom de Freston’s painting studio.