A ‘STAGE 0’ CANCER STORY

What We Still Get Wrong About Breasts

How a mastectomy at a scarily young age changed a writer

Cover of Jean Hannah Edelstein’s “Breasts” / Phoenix via bookseller Katie Clapham

Is there anything we still don’t know about breasts in an age of porn, nude beaches, corporate lactation rooms, and “drive-by mastectomies” that send women home from hospitals hours after major surgery? After reviewing countless books on them as a critic, I was skeptical.

But the journalist Jean Hannah Edelstein once wrote an essay for the Guardian called “Just Because I Moved to New Jersey Doesn’t Mean I’m Dead.” A title like that is irresistible if you grew up in Springsteen country, as I did, and hers introduced a well-reasoned defense of the Garden State.

So I took note when I learned that Edelstein had written a memoir called Breasts: A Relatively Brief Relationship (Phoenix, 2025), which has arrived just ahead of all those “Pinktober” promotions for Breast Cancer Awareness Month. I found that, like her Guardian essay, her book had unexpected insights into its subject.

Edelstein wrote a 2018 memoir called This Really Isn’t About You about her father’s death from cancer and learning soon afterward that she had Lynch syndrome, which predisposes you to certain forms of the disease. Breasts deals in part with her discovery, at the age of 41…