FLESH & BONES: Learning to Love This Body

Liddy Grantland lives with a body that hurts all the time. During her final year as an undergraduate, she decided to write about chronic pain for her school newspaper. Her words, collected in this volume, tell an intimate and particular story of what one woman’s body is teaching her about love, loss, and justice. Grantland offers an honest and hopeful vision for what the world might look like if we all learned to love our flesh and bones: how our churches, schools, relationships, and politics  could be liberated by an intersectional feminist ethic of embodiment. This collection insists that hurt and healing, grief and wholeness, fear and hope have never been mutually exclusive, and that the work of being present to the pain of our bodies and our world will set each one of us free.

Liddy Grantland, born and raised in Columbia, South Carolina, graduated from Duke University in 2020 with a degree in African American Studies and English. While at Duke, she wrote a biweekly column for The Chronicle called “Feel Your Feelings” that was about living with chronic pain and living with much more. Grantland currently lives in an intentional community in the DC area.