Hot, Wet & Shaking: 10th Anniversary Edition

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.

Praise for Hot, Wet & Shaking:

“I hope we continue to have conversations about disability, desire, difference and commonality, with curiosity and a few juicy jokes. With Kaleigh Trace’s book in our hands, we have one of the best examples of how to do so.”—Christa Couture, broadcaster and author of How to Lose Everything

“Hot, Wet & Shaking is written in the tone of a trusted and cheeky friend, confessing secrets that shake loose their shame when spoken aloud. This is not the sex advice of a poised, multi-orgasmic, inaccessible, or clinical expert, but rather the honest musings of a woman in a pair of yesterday’s dirty jeans.”―National Post

“Hot, Wet & Shaking is a funny, fast and absorbing read; powerful, empowering, and so important.”―Pickle Me This

“Hot, Wet & Shaking is a much-needed lighthouse that guides us all with love and laughter.”―Broken Pencil

“Honesty, self-awareness, a wicked sense of humour, an unflinching sense of the ridiculous. You generally need all of these to be able to talk as candidly about your sex life as Kaleigh Trace has done[;] she sheds light on sexual stories and scripts we don’t usually get to hear, but which are a part of a lot of people’s lives.”―Ready, Sexy, Able

“Hot, Wet & Shaking is laugh-out-loud funny in some parts, incredibly touching in others (pun partially intended)… Trace’s book is like a talk with an old friend you can share anything with.”―Sexual Health Lunenburg

“Hot, Wet & Shaking is an important read…This book fights the myths about sex and disability and starts discussions that are long overdue.”―The Dialog

“Kaleigh Trace has learned to talk about sex and she has learned to do it extremely well.”―The Coast