‘We’d been through so much’: Jean Hannah Edelstein on breasts – and life without them

All her life Jean Hannah Edelstein had tried to feel comfortable with her breasts, battling unwelcome attention and breastfeeding woes. But then came cancer and a double mastectomy – and she realised she was losing something she loved

Let me tell you about my breasts, of blessed memory. That’s not something I would have said while I still had them. I was quite prim, you see, and maybe I still am, but a double mastectomy gives you license to say “‘breast” over and over again, without the usual consequences. My breasts were real, and they were spectacular.

That’s a Seinfeld reference, if you’re not familiar. Seinfeld was one of the shows that I watched often in my adolescent years when my breasts first asserted themselves. It was among our key texts. We were in late-20th-century America, my breasts and I. It was a time and place that taught me that women’s bodies – breasts, specifically – were objects of desire, and jokes, and danger. Friends, Baywatch, Melrose Place. Clueless, Scream. Britney, Beyoncé. Monica Lewinsky.