REVIEW: Legs Heart Minds: Loss and Its Remedies by Chris Jones

Reviewed by Linda Lowen

Chris Jones knows how to play the game. In his memoir Legs Hearts Minds: Loss and Its Remedies (Random House; June 2026), the Canadian author and longtime sports journalist kicks off with an electric moment: the discovery of his wife’s infidelity.

How this impacts his family, children, career, and sense of self is only half the story. The other half is a paean to soccer, specifically Burnley F.C., a professional football club in Lancashire, England, which plays its home games at Turf Moor, a stadium that—he later reveals—is part of his immigrant English/Welsh family lore.

An award-winning magazine writer with bylines in The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal Magazine, Esquire, ESPN, CBC, and other outlets, Jones uses the up-again, down-again team as a metaphor for his own rollercoaster fortunes.

“Eh,” you may be thinking, “I’m not interested in soccer.” Maybe not, but each of us has an activity or pursuit that offers release and solace—an immersive practice that, in times of duress, is a lifeline of salvation. When we’re wandering and lost, that passion becomes our directional North Star—a truth strikingly illustrated through Jones’s immersive recollections.

In one poignant scene from a childhood visit to his maternal relatives, Jones recreates the moment in which rooting for the underdog football club became more than just an exercise in fandom.

“Late in the summer of 1985, when I was eleven years old, I graduated in my grandfather’s esteem…he took me to Turf Moor to see Burnley for the first time. I don’t remember anything about the game…only the feeling I had, being there with my grandfather. I felt anointed.” Jones spent his pocket money on “a scarf, claret with Burnley in sky blue,” and wore it proudly despite the team’s loss that day. As he left the stadium, his grandfather fell into conversation with a stranger who “looked down at me and my new scarf and smiled. ‘Don’t worry, son,’ he said. ‘We’ll be back up soon.’ I smiled shyly. I had only a vague idea of what he meant. I know better now.”

Thirty-one years later, in the summer of 2016, Jones returned home from a Paris-based assignment covering the European football championships in France. Just before the trip, though “I’d left for work a thousand times before…that goodbye felt different. Our marriage was in a bad place, snared in a tangle of resentments,” his wife unhappy at how little time he spent with their eight- and ten-year-old sons. Jet lagged and unable to sleep, he headed to the leather chair in the den where “I decided to make use of my wakefulness. Amy’s MacBook was on the coffee table in front of me…I figured I’d do a bit of research online. I picked up Amy’s laptop, dropped back into my leather chair…and opened the screen.”

There he witnessed Amy texting Brad, a friend of theirs, also married with two kids. Gleaning that they were in a longtime affair, he confronted his wife. Mindful of his sons sleeping nearby, “I did not vent the rage that coursed through me. There were only whispered recriminations in the dark. My marriage ended with a hiss.”

With Brad, however, “My desire for violence was all-consuming. I contemplated going over to his house with a crowbar…Then I remembered Charley and Sammy…and realized that enough of their universe was about to change without their father going to jail, too. I stayed…not out of any self-restraint on my part, or anything like nobility. My sleeping boys kept me…there.”

The book’s timeline moves forward with occasional flashbacks to revelatory moments that expose a thread of explosive anger—the ugly running stitch throughout his life. Recognizing that “for years…I’d chosen anger over sadness because anger gave me an enemy that wasn’t me and my faults,” he seeks therapy to resolve a legacy of sadness passed down from his mother

Jones writes with an unshielded vulnerability, especially in moments where his actions skirt the edge of dangerous outcomes. He’s frank about his depression, suicide ideation, even his occasional inclination toward violence—and he owns his behaviors: “Writing, like football, can be a healing exercise. It can also be wounding…especially for someone who must atone for as many mistakes as I’ve made.”

The book’s distinctive title comes from Burnley manager Sean Dyche’s “neat encapsulation of the three ways an underdog can win a football game,” Jones writes. The guidance “caught me in a different way…It was about you and what you can do for yourself.”

The book’s driving appeal is simple: it’s the story of an individual trying hard to be better.

Beyond his clear confessional voice, Jones’s authorial choices expand what could have been a niche memoir into one of wider general interest. As a magazine writer used to pitching ideas, he understands the hard truth of creative nonfiction: publishers choose stories they believe will sell, a fact that guides editorial decision-making for both periodicals and full-length books.

Non-celebrity, non-influencer, and/or lesser-known authors who land publishing contracts for their memoirs understand the game of commercial viability. Typically, their manuscripts:

• Demonstrate their expertise
• Center a universal theme
• Focus on an event or time period that encapsulates lifelong struggles
• Tie their story to current issues or upcoming headline events.
• Reveal mistakes and vulnerability on the page

Jones positioned Legs Hearts Minds to optimize its success upon release by checking off all the above.

His expertise stretches beyond sports journalism; he’s published three previous nonfiction titles on wide-ranging subjects.

Though infidelity is the inciting incident, the universal themes touch on mental health issues including unresolved anger, depression, and suicide.

The span of the narrative focus is a ten-year period during which—as a father, husband, and son—he learns to handle his lifelong struggle with rage and sadness.

The book’s release coincides with a once-in-a-lifetime headline event: the US hosting the 2026 World Cup. With the book publishing on June 2, 2026 in the US and June 11 in the UK, just before the first US World Cup game on June 12, 2026 in Los Angeles, it benefited from media exposure far beyond that which is typically given to memoir; coverage included Kirkus Reviews’ “5 Books to Get You in the World Cup Spirit” and an excerpt in The Atlantic.

And Jones’s full-bore commitment to reveal himself and his family—which has him offering an apology in the Acknowledgments—corrects his English mother’s belief that “trauma was something you swallowed. You kept it inside and it made you stronger”; instead, he ends with a reminder to his sons “that secrets are poison…grief lessens only when it’s shared,” and his love for them is absolute.

This isn’t a narrative in the cheerful mold of Apple TV’s belief-fueled Ted Lasso; in fact, “A Note from the Publisher” precedes the text with a trigger warning of “frank discussions of suicide” and a brief list of resources.

Instead, it’s real life with incomplete moments, raw edges, rage contained and mostly resolved. It’s the years-long recovery of a man who, on X (formerly Twitter) under the handle @EnswellJones, makes clear his intent in a pinned post: “I used to tell stories here to try to help people feel better. I’ve written a book, and I hope it does the same.”

Legs Hearts Minds is an affecting memoir that speaks openly of pain, grief, regret—and the satisfaction of each small, hard-earned win toward recovery. In exposing the best and worst of himself and not holding back on either, the author’s losses are the reader’s gains.