Breasts: A Relatively Brief Relationship by Jean Hannah Edelstein

the spectator 12 april 2025

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.”’

Most popular

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.’ But a friend said: ‘It kind of looks like you had a baby with Gisele Bündchen.’

In the part entitled ‘Food’, she becomes pregnant and considers the fact that her breasts are about to have a different purpose – to feed her son – as ‘a freedom. Even a revenge’. For starters, she is no longer subject to catcalls during this period. Her baby was conceived by IVF and is delivered by C-section, and she comments that this makes her feel somewhat like ‘a passive participant in his creation’. She goes on: ‘I wanted to breastfeed because I wanted to do something by myself, unmediated and unmedicated. I wanted something to be natural.’ Her maternal grandmother had called breastfeeding ‘the life of a cow’. Edelstein notes: ‘I also wanted to breastfeed because I wanted to experience the full utility of my breasts. For so long it had seemed that their sole purpose was as objects of pleasure: sometimes mine, very often other people’s.’ She candidly recounts watching her husband spill half of the milk she painstakingly expressed – before leaving her baby to go to a doctor’s appointment – and being unable to speak to him for hours.

She has another child, a daughter, and at the end of breastfeeding her, she reflects: ‘My breasts belonged to me.’ It is poignant that these are the last words before the final section. Aged 41, Edelstein is diagnosed with breast cancer. She contemplates the mastectomy that her surgeon says is necessary, although her cancer is at a very early stage. She remembers a long-forgotten boyfriend who had early male-pattern baldness and had once remarked how little time he and his hair had spent together. ‘I didn’t grow any until I was two and I started losing it when I was 20,’ he said. ‘In the total span of my life, my relationship with hair will have been relatively brief.’ She experiments with thinking of her breasts in the same way and the detachment helps to some extent.

She also contemplates the reconstruction after surgery, and I felt enraged for her when she reports that some misguided people

tried to help me see the bright side, implying that this was the opportunity for me to have the breasts of my dreams. I felt offended on behalf of the breasts that I had. What I wanted to say was: ‘These are the breasts of my dreams. The ones attached to my body.’

Her interactions with different surgeons – including the one who told her ‘Of course, you can’t expect them to look as good as natural ones’ – are fascinating and important. Roughly one in seven women in the UK will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. How wonderful that we now have this sane, detailed and funny account of Edelstein’s experience from detection to reconstruction. The writer and breast cancer survivor Rosamund Dean has described it as ‘a tit punch of a book, in a good way’. At 100-odd pages, it also powerfully makes the case that sometimes, a short book is best.

This review originally appeared in The Spectator