Winner of the 2015 Evelyn Richardson Non-fiction Award
Revised and expanded tenth anniversary edition, featuring new essays and an afterword by Christa Couture.
Desire is holy, sex is church, and our bodies are built for pleasure and connection. These are the tenets that Kaleigh Trace lives by and which she explores in these memoirs and essays. This revised and expanded anniversary edition includes new essays on grief and medicine, as well as a foreword from Kaleigh, in which she contemplates the future as she continues her pursuit of pleasure with a diagnosis of terminal cancer. Christa Couture contributes an afterword.
Hot, Wet & Shaking chronicles Trace’s journey from ignorance to bliss, from being a critically uncool teenager to a successful couple’s and sex therapist, all while weaving together themes of feminism, sex positivity, and disabilty justice. Writing as a queer, disabled, cisgender woman, Trace lays bare the vulnerability inherent in all of our bodies, the healing intimacy that can be found in loving community, and the endless capacity for humour and play that sex can offer us. Trace laughs at her missteps, forgives herself her errors, and reassures the reader that imperfection is perfect.
Moving from the delight of learning how to orgasm to the grief of living with cancer, Trace welcomes you into her world, inviting you to consider the freedom available to us all when we set aside the shaming pressure of expectation. Will this book teach you “how to talk about sex”? Yes, and then some.
Kaleigh Trace is a writer and therapist living in Toronto. In a previous life she made sex education her business. Her first book, Hot, Wet & Shaking: How I Learned to Talk about Sex was published in 2014 and won the Evelyn Richardson Non-Fiction Award. The 10th anniversary edition (2024) includes new essays and an afterword from Christa Couture. Kaleigh's work has also appeared in The Coast, Shameless Magazine, and on CBC Radio's Tapestry. Kaleigh has a Masters of Science in Couple’s and Family Therapy and passable punch-needling skills.
