Jean Hannah Edelstein is a British-American journalist and the author of a 2018 memoir entitled This Really Isn’t About You, which was about her dating life, the death of her father and her discovery that she had Lynch syndrome – which predisposes her to some cancers, as it had her dad. There is a sickening inevitability that her Breasts is at least partly about her being diagnosed with breast cancer. Yet, this is an uplifting volume, as well as a short, sharp shock.
The three sections of the book, ‘Sex’, ‘Food’ and ‘Cancer’, mean that readers will know what’s coming. But before the final section, Edelstein writes perceptively about adolescence, her first bra and being made to feel even by her schoolteachers that she and her female classmates ‘walked around in our flagrant, provocative teenage bodies day in and out. If men regarded them as invitations – well, had we tried hard enough to stop them?’ Later, she is honest about weaponising a great rack, not least when she meets men in bars: ‘“I’m Jean,” I’d say. “I believe you’ve already met my breasts.”’
She writes measuredly about the assaults she was subjected to by colleagues – one when she worked in a bar and another when she was employed by a tech company – and strangers, including the teenage boys who pelted her with eggs so incessantly that she feared she would crash the bike she was riding. And she is funny about the glamorous illustration drawn of her to accompany a dating column she wrote for a men’s magazine, lamenting: ‘I’m not hot enough to be myself.’
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