It’s hard to know where to start with champion wrestler Saraya-Jade Bevis. Do we start in the same place as her memoir, at rock bottom aged 25 when a sex tape of Bevis taking part in a threesome was leaked and went viral? At that time, Bevis was suspended from wrestling, addicted to alcohol and, she says, snorting so much cocaine that her nose was spraying out blood.
Or do we start with her childhood in Norwich, raised by a family of wrestlers, ex-cons and alcoholics, living in a council house where, she says, the rent was always due and dinner might be mashed potato sandwiches. The childhood sexual abuse that she had kept hidden for most of her life? Her rags-to-riches signing at 18 to WWE, the largest wrestling promotion in the world? Her new life in the US, when she was enjoying success as champion wrestler Paige, but feeling lonely, homesick, vulnerable? She met some very bad men. She partied too hard. She fractured her neck. She spent five years in recovery before returning to the ring. Her memoir is called Hell in Boots: Clawing My Way Through Nine Lives for good reason. “There’s actually a lot I had to leave out as I couldn’t fit it all in,” Bevis says of the book. “How am I only 32?”
