This is not so much as a review, as 21 reasons why Jessica Hepburn should step onto the stage and take a bow.

Bow 1: Skilful narration

21 Miles is about Jessica’s endeavour to swim the Channel after 11 unsuccessful rounds of IVF, which she has written about in her previous book, The Pursuit of Motherhood. She gets a skilful narration point for telling the IVF backstory in a way that makes sense to those who don’t already know it but which isn’t repetitive to those who do.

Bow 2: Swimming

It’s an awesome thing that’s hard to describe. Jessica captures it both physically and metaphorically. “I can feel tears in my goggles but here in the pool, no one knows, not even the water, because water only knows tears as itself.”

Bow 3: Nature

It’s not just any old swimming but open water swimming that Jessica’s doing here. So the book is also about our relationship with nature. “Even though I feel small and vulnerable, as I start to swim I also feel something else. The words of a poem my dad used to recite to me when I was a child come unbidden into my mind: ‘And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more’.”

Bow 4: Humour

What can I say? This girl’s hilarious.

Bow 5: Food

As if it wasn’t enough to connect motherhood and swimming, Jessica makes this into a food story too. In so doing she integrates another of those themes that’s BIG for most women. Big love to Jessica for her fully-fledged fest of all things edible.

Bow 6: Skilful narration

She gets another skilful narration point for integrating such diverse themes into a coherent story.

Bow 7: Other women

Jessica invites women, ranging from scientist Baroness Greenfield (childless) to businesswoman Nicola Horlick (mother of six), to have lunch with her and answer the question of whether motherhood makes you happy. This is interesting, as it’s a question we don’t tend to ask. It’s also beautifully expansive as she finds a point of connection in each of the women’s baby stories and thereby binds them (us) together.

Bow 8: Reflections on motherhood

She might have missed the experience of motherhood but she had the meaning (to paraphrase TS Eliot). Through her quest she unveils insights that are fuller and deeper than those of many a literal mother.

Bow 9: Skilful narration

Jessica asks each of the women to give her one word to take with her on her swim and in so doing creates a poem. She deserves a skilful narration point for the very idea. When she has to dig deep in her swim, she recalls those words with each stroke. In so doing takes all the women she has interviewed with her and, by extension, all of womankind too. God bless you, Jessica.

Bow 10: Vulnerability

This vulnerability is all the more powerful because it’s shared before the wound has healed. “Sometimes I think the hardest thing about what I’ve been through – what we’ve been through – is that it makes it difficult to love because you’re so frightened of happiness being taken away.”

Bow 11: Living for the unborn children

A fellow swimmer, Nick, says swimming the Channel is all about the strength of the things deep inside you that are driving you forward. Jessica discovers her motivation. “Mille Gade swam the Channel for her children. I’m swimming it for me and Gertrude Ederle and the children we never had.” I find this both poignant and deeply inspiring.

Bow 12: Uterus-power

Jessica has her doubters, the greatest of which is Chris, who doesn’t think she stands a hope in Hell’s chance because she’s always complaining about the cold. But Jessica unveiled what the competitive sportsman couldn’t see – the gravitational pull of the womb.

Bow 13: Healing of family

It’s not part of the core narrative, but along the way Jessica grows in appreciation for her mum and dad and their own journeys into parenthood. It’s a beautiful reaching back as the stretches forward. After her swim, she goes for a picnic with her mum. “Because although neither of us quite had the family of our dreams, we do have the family of our reality and that will always be something to treasure.”

Bow 14: Control

There are plenty in our culture who make out we can control our destiny through a mix of positive thinking and grim determination. Swimming the Channel and making a baby give the lie to that. This book tells a more truthful story – about the dance between what we can control and what we can’t and is all the more inspiring for it.

Bow 15: Conclusion 1 – sadness

And so Jessica starts to reach her conclusions on her search for the meaning of motherhood. “Every single person in the world seems to have something that makes them terribly sad. And life is about making the best of your sad thing.”

Bow 16: Conclusion 2 – connection

“Connection is vital to human happiness and if you can’t get it ready-made by having your own children you need to create it in different ways.”

Bow 17: Conclusion 3 – something else

Jessica recognises that however much women want to have children, they need to have something else as well. I am sure this is true. There is, at the heart of motherhood, and ambivalence. We want our children, but we also want to get back to our “something else” – our work, our silence, our creativity, whatever it is. If we don’t have a something else, it will be very difficult to let our children go as they grow up. So the something else is at the heart of motherhood as well as the heart of life.

Bow 18: Skilful narration

Jessica manages to keep the story twisting to the end. In almost the last chapter, she reveals she had asked each woman what they would eat for their last supper. When she has finished her swim, she eats that food as a celebration. It’s a surprising detail, all the better for being held back and which celebrates the symbolic power of food as well as nicely concluding the theme.

Bow 19: Climax 3 – relationship

There are three endings to this story, each of which had me in tears. The final (surprising) climax is the last word – love – which Jessica’s partner, Peter, giver her retrospectively as her Channel word. This is a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship. (It’s also NOT a story about what 11 failed attempts at IVF can do to a relationship and Jessica gets a bonus skilful narration point for the way she manages to tell the story while empathically not telling that story in deference to Peter’s desire for privacy.)

Bow 20: Climax 2 – She did it!

She bloody well did it! Listen to that sound. It’s the sound of all my eggs rushing down my fallopian tubes to stand on the edge of my uterus cheering. Well done Jessica! Bloody, menstrual bloody, well done!

Bow 21: Climax 3 – mother

For me, the most profound part of the book was when Jessica’s mother gave her childless daughter the word “mother” to swim the Channel with. I could have cried her a Channel. I almost did.

I hope you’ve not got backache from all the bowing, Jessica. But you’ve swum the Channel, so you should be OK. What more can I say? Thank you.

On Tuesday, 24 February at 7.30pm, I will be leading a workshop on sexuality for Birmingham Changing Attitude. We will be trying to find constructive ways of talking about sexuality in churches.

The next morning – Wednesday, 25 February at 11am – Katrice Horsley and I will be celebrating the re-opening of the Oxfam Bookstore in Kings Heath by telling stories and opening a conversation on motherhood and creativity.

“First sex, then babies,” is how I’ve been remembering it.  But whose to say it happens in that order?  Chickens, eggs…you know.

Either way, it would be great to see you there.

Dr Susannah Cornwall, who wrote the theology section of the book, is a woman after my heart and mind on sexuality.

She says the church tends to think that sexuality issues are about homosexuality because it constructs homosexuality as “other”.

One things that follows from that is that heterosexuality is often unmarked, it’s just something in the water that people barely notice or comment on because they take it for granted.

“Sexuality isn’t just to do with orientation it’s broader than that,” she says.

I do so agree.  Much of my own work, has been around finding a way of conceptualising sexuality so that we can all sit down and listen and weave our theology together.

I hope some of us will be doing that at the Birmingham launch of the book. Everyone is welcome on Tuesday, 24 February 2015 at 7.30pm at Balsall Heath Church Centre, 100 Mary Street, Balsall Heath B12 9JU

The event is hosted by the Birmingham branch of Changing Attitude.

The book is part of a series published by Darton Longmann and Todd which aims to make the church more inclusive on matters such as mental health, disability, sexuality, poverty, gender and ethnicity.

Inclusive Church is an organisation founded in 2003, initially because of concern at the resignation of Revd Dr Jeffrey John as Bishop of Reading, but thereafter because it wanted to work towards a church that is welcoming and open to all.

It seems Anglicans and Catholics have spent the summer speaking about gay marriage while millions, on the underground, in book clubs and online have been discussing Anastasia Steele and her relationship with the sadomasochist Christian Grey.

Can they get together despite their incompatible sexualities?

The central issue of the easy-read book which has topped the UK best-sellers list for the past six months, is of a 22-year-old virgin who falls in love with a multi-billionaire who wants to tie her up and spank her and make her ask for more. Anastasia is looking for romance. Christian can‘t get turned on when sex is vanilla.  Can they find a way of getting it together despite their seemingly incompatible sexualities?

It’s an interesting question and one that raises questions for us all about compromise within sex, going outside our comfort zones, working out what we really don’t like and what we could develop a taste for.

Confusing sadomasochism with domestic violence

Last month the discussion took a darker turn.  Clare Phillipson, director of Wearside Women in Need, a charity for victims of domestic violence, called for women to burn their copies on 5 November along with an effigy of Christian Grey, on the grounds that it is “an instruction manual for an abusive individual to sexually torture a vulnerable young woman.”

Phillipson claims the story is about a domestic violence perpetrator who takes someone who is less experienced and powerful, spins her a yarn, starts doing horrific sexual things to her and makes it seem normal.  She worries that teenagers will be picking the book up and thinking: “This is alright.”

The church needs a foothold in Fifty Shades debates

I think it’s important for the church to get a foothold in the discussion at this point, but it’s difficult for it to do so because historically its understanding of sexual ethics has been focussed on procreative acts – heterosexual vaginal intercourse in the context of marriage and so on. This way of thinking has nothing to offer when exploring Fifty Shades of Grey-type dilemmas.

The first thing that I would say to Phillipson is that I can understand why women who have been beaten by their partners are highly-sensitised to beatings in erotic fantasies. I have sympathy with those who are reminded, through reading Fifty Shades of Grey, of being stalked and abused and traumatised.

But I would also say that it is very important to draw a distinction between a scenario in which a woman consents to being spanked because it turns her on and in which there is an agreed safe word for her say when she wants it to stop, and one in which a chap simply beats the Hell out of her.

Christian Grey is a role-model

I think Christian Grey goes far further than your average bloke in ensuring that Anastasia really is consenting to what they do in sex. On that count, he is a role-model.

Having said that, I agree that “consent” is slippery. There is an argument that women have been socialised to be submissive to men and that the submissive/dominant dynamic has been eroticised. A woman’s desire to be submissive could be seen as evidence of her oppression rather than her liberation, even if she does consent to it.

I agree with that. Besides, we all know we can “consent” to things because we’re vulnerable, because our options are limited, because we think everybody else is doing it, because we feel we want something but when we actually do it we realise that we don’t.

Consent is tricksy

Consent is dynamic, it’s tricksy and it can take considerable skill and experience to discern when it is deep and authentic and when it is half-baked and mistaken.

This is where the church has a great deal to offer. It has a very handy tool up its sleeve for assessing the quality of consent – the teachings of Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order.

Ignatius’ discernment can be used in sex

Ignatius taught about consolation and desolation. When we are consoled, he said, new energy is released and we feel closer to others. When we are desolate, we turn in on ourselves and feel drained. With practice we can evaluate our experiences according to how desolate or consoled they made us and we can choose to live more in consolation.

I think this practice is invaluable in discerning whether our sexual experiences are truly what we want or whether we are being manipulated and compromising where we shouldn’t be. If Anastasia came to me for help in her dilemma with Christian, I would offer her St Ignatius.  “When you are playing with Christian, listen very carefully to your feelings, both as it’s happening and afterwards.  How is it making you feel?  Is it making you feel peaceful and fully alive? Is it making you withdraw and contract inside?”

In all my readings of sex manuals and feminist literature, I have found nothing as useful as this tool for improving sex.  The church has so much to offer in making better lovers of us all. Come on. Let’s give it.

• This article was first published in The Church Times, 14 September 2012