Ovid’s story of Orpheus and Eurydice becomes a recurring lens for thinking about longing, distance, and the pain of loving someone whose body is under constant threat.

In 2020, artist Tom de Freston and his wife, novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave, discovered they were expecting twins. The pregnancy ended in miscarriage, followed by the loss of six more pregnancies over the following years. Strange Bodies is de Freston’s account of that period: a record of grief, endurance, intimacy, and the slow, uncertain path toward parenthood.

Written as a direct address to his wife, Strange Bodies is intimate about the physical and emotional realities of these intimacies. As he tries to understand what these losses mean — for himself, for Kiran, and for their relationship — de Freston turns to art and myth. Alongside this, he reflects on artists including Titian, Francis Bacon, Bracha Ettinger, and Gerhard Richter, using their work to think through vulnerability, desire, and the ethics of looking.