A Life Reimagined

About the book

Heartfelt and honest, A Life Reimagined is a touching memoir of love, loss and life after tragedy from beloved actress Jill Halfpenny.

When Jill was four, her father died. He went to play his weekly game of five-a-side football, had a heart attack and never came home. In 2017, in cruelly similar circumstances, Jill’s partner Matt went to a gym class, suffered a cardiac arrest and never came home.

These two tragic events frame Jill’s story in Life Reimagined as she explores how she dealt with profound grief as a child and teenager and then later in life as a partner and mother. When Matt died, Jill committed to processing her grief in ways she hadn’t attempted before: she had to rebuild her father, recreate that grief and lose him all over again. She explored the physiology of grief, attended grief retreats, read every book out there and underwent extensive therapy.

A Life Reimagined is Jill's space to share what she has learnt – both about herself and about how we view grief as a society – in the hope that she can help readers feel like they can start to put one foot in front of the other and feel hopeful about life again.