Grabbing life with one hand

Just before her tenth birthday Sarah Anderson, an upper-middle-class Catholic living in Knightsbridge, discovered a cancerous lump below her left elbow and was given a few months to live. The doctors recommended amputation.

She was photographed by the future Lord Snowdon so that there would be 'a lasting record of how I had looked', and on the day before her operation she played the part of Mary in her school Nativity. As she raised both arms in prayer for the Magnificat, "it must have struck them all that this was going to be the last time."

Halfway to Venus is a survivor's account of what it is to live with only one arm. Anderson unflinchingly describes the impact of an amputation that may have been unnecessary and her long slow struggle against other people's attitudes, namely their own fear. Having one arm, she writes, was "a visible secret" that provoked embarrassed stares, stupid questions and awkward euphemisms.

She tells of a friend who insisted on sitting beside her in the theatre in order to "lend" a hand to clap with; of the teacher who worried that if Anderson attempted high-jump she would do irreparable harm were she to fall on her "short arm". Shrinking from terms like 'stump' or 'flipper', Anderson admits to having found no word adequate to describe the small part of her upper arm which remains.

A Benedictine Father tells her: "We define ourselves by what we have lost." She laments that she can't use the plural of hand, cross arms, do a cartwheel. But she also learns there's "nothing I couldn't at least attempt to do on my own".

She travels. She opens, at 13 Blenheim Crescent, the Travel Bookshop, a unique institution of sofas, fresh coffee and the atmosphere of Shakespeare & Co in Paris (which features as Hugh Grant's shop in the romantic comedy Notting Hill). She has lovers, whom she invites back to her apartment above the shop.

Uncoy about sex, Anderson explores with horrified astonishment the phenomenon of stump fetishists like 'acrotomophiles' who are attracted to female amputees; or 'apotemnophiles' who hanker to be amputees themselves. She even goes on a 'One-Arm Dove Hunt' in Texas.

What she calls her search for her "lost" arm leads Anderson well beyond a moving personal history and into a broader investigation of the significance of the hand and arm in art and literature. There are memorable quotes, arresting observations. For example: nine out of ten people when shown photographs of hands are unable to recognise their own among them.

When it comes to recognising herself, she is brisk. "I hate the thought of being described as 'the woman with one arm' and I never refer to myself as having one arm when asked what I look like." Attractive, self-possessed, even regal, Anderson inevitably invites comparisons with her book's cover photograph showing the Venus de Milo.

France's Ambassador in Constantinople, who shipped the statue to Paris, boasted: "My girl doesn't have any arms, but that doesn't matter, she can still open the door of the Institute [the Louvre]." To Kenneth Clark, she was the "most splendid physical ideal of humanity". To Anderson, it is because she'd lost her arms that Venus was seen as the 'Eternal Feminine' who needed protection, "but ­ more erotically ­ a woman who was unable to push men away".

Huffy, candid, unself-pitying, the result is a fascinating and empowering book that addresses "the issue of how people deal with anything at all unfamiliar" and teaches that there's nothing to be afraid of.
'Halfway to Venus: A One-Armed Journey' by Sarah Anderson, Umbrella Books, £12.99 ·