I read this in the same week as Travis Alabanza's None of the Above and I found that the books complement each other perfectly. I would recommend reading them in close proximity to enrich your enjoyment of both books. Laing explores the notion of the body and the freedoms that the type of body that you are born into afford or denies you. She covers a lot of ground here. We look at Susan Sontag and Wilhelm Reich, Kate Bush, Agnes Martin, Freud and Nina Simone to name but a few. We look at painting, music, the civil rights movement, the prison system, homophobia, racism, environmentalism and the rise of the far right, amongst other things. It might sound like a jumble, but it isn't. We journey from one idea to the next (the fundamental interconnectedness of all things) and each talks to the other, all the while circling and looking at the central idea of the freedom for the body, both within and without. External pressure shapes us and internal pressures push back and somewhere in this push me, pull you, we try to find a space where we are allowed to be ourselves, where we fit.

Setting a dazzling course through the struggle for bodily freedom, starting with Wilhelm Reich and Freud but taking in diverse subjects as incarceration, feminism & the restrictions of illness. Fascinating and compulsively readable.