To Exist As I Am
At the age of twenty-two, Grace Spence Green's spine was broken and her life changed course. One day, she was in hospital supporting patients, the next she was one herself.
Over the years that followed, words like healing and recovery took on new meanings. Some emotions, like sadness and self-pity, dimmed. Others were heightened, and Grace learned to embrace them all: anger at a world ill-equipped to accommodate her new body; passion to demand change; and joy found in community, nature and wild swimming.
Through her powerful story, Grace shows how we can come back to ourselves after trauma and fight for change while joyously embracing life exactly as we are.
WINNER OF THE 2026 SOMERSET MAUGHAM AWARD
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2026
'This book is extraordinary' MIRANDA HART
'Life-affirming' VIV GROSKOP
'Astonishing, important, and truly radical ' POLLY MORLAND
Reviews
Grace said she made the decision not to hold out for a cure or "for my legs to wake up ... life was for living now". Surrendering to what happens to us, to find joy and meaning in spite of it, is the bravest and most wise choice we can make and this book is an extraordinary one to inspire just that -- Miranda Hart
This immersive, deeply moving book is so much more than a meditation on learning medicine. Spence Green's physical injuries are severe enough, but she also has to contend with the million microaggressions and forms of systematic exclusion that disabled people face in modern Britain. It's a beautiful, powerful, indelible read -- Rachel Clarke ― Guardian
A book of wisdom and love, trauma and acceptance, extraordinary resilience and justified anger, it'll change the way you think about disability. Stop whatever it is that you're reading and read Grace Spence Green instead -- Gavin Francis
A wonderfully intricate, heartfelt account of the blurred line between patient and doctor. This book explores the strength and the fragility of the human body and celebrates the depth and tenacity of the human spirit. Grace's story is immersive, inspiring and life-affirming -- Viv Groskop
Astonishing, important, and truly radical. In picking apart so many of the tired binaries we use to think about love, care, trauma and healing, it is as if - at last - someone had switched the lights on. Lucid and hopeful but also fierce in its challenge to a world that so often gets disability all wrong, this book is completely transformative. -- Polly Morland
Unputdownable, awe-inspiring, necessary. The best book I've read by a doctor in a very long time -- Gabriel Weston
It radically reframes disability -- Melanie Reid ― Observer
Having also been through spinal cord injury, this is the best personal account of that trauma. I kept wanting to underline sentences because they are so true and so beautiful -- Tom Shakespeare
To Exist As I Am upends the familiar tropes of the rehab memoir, and gives us something perceptive and new ... Valuable, insightful and beautifully written -- James and Lucy Catchpole
Exquisitely written and compelling, this book tells the story of a remarkable doctor. By the end it will have upended the preconceptions many of us hold as to what it is to lead a rich, fulfilled life -- Caroline Elton
A deeply impactful and honest exploration of disability, healing, and identity. Grace Spence Green's story is an essential voice in the conversation on anti-ableism and true representation -- Shani Dhanda
A story of injury, loss and acceptance that asks us to consider what it truly means to recover. Grace Spence Green shows us how much we can gain when we stop trying to overcome disability and start embracing it as part of what makes us human. Her story is inspiring in the best possible ways as an activist call to arms and a testament to the joy that comes through finding your community -- David Turner
An astonishing book -- Ed Balls
It rocked my relationship with blame, pity and vulnerability -- Leena Norms, author of Half-Arse Human and British Book Awards judge
