The Story of My Tits (Book Review)

Review by Elizabeth Weitz

Tits.

The power that they wield is both mysterious and a bit odd. All they are made up of are blood vessels and fatty tissue yet somehow they command the human species to look upon them as if they were sexuality/femininity incarnate. That somewhere, deep inside the muck and tissue that make up the chest region of the female body, there is magic and truth of who we are.

And yet, weirdly, balls don’t seem to hold the same mystique…hmmm.

In Jennifer Hayden’s deliciously honest Story of My Tits the personal relationship between a woman and her bosom is beautifully told through the narrative of the comic panel (a medium that seems specifically made for this kind of story).

From the awkward longing of a pre-adolescent Hayden who is desperate to fill a bra to her breast cancer diagnosis at 43 (which results in her losing the objects of her obsession) all of it is unabashedly documented in a rough style that feels and reads like a private journal rather than a book released to the public.

But the story of Hayden’s tits isn’t just about the flesh bags on her chest, it’s also about finding out who she is as she grows from child to woman.

It’s about the frailty of the human experience, the struggles of dealing with cancer, a disease that strikes out at not only herself, but the people she loves as well, and the realities of losing pieces of yourself (both figuratively and metaphorically. Hayden is not afraid to show her life through crudely constructed illustrations which feel far more intimate than words alone.

Forced by the medium to cut all but the essential, Hayden’s journey is boiled down to her most poignant, most hilarious, most embarrassing and most personal experiences. As she moves between stages of life, we, the reader are drawn into her voyage as if we are there with her, acting as a silent traveler.

And it is simply glorious.

This year 231,840 cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed and each and every woman who sits down in her doctor’s office to receive the news has a story to tell about her tits. Some of those stories are mundane, some are more dramatic than a Lifetime original movie, but all are a tale to tell.

In the case of Jennifer Hayden, the story of her tits is an amalgam of all those tales that are never publicly told. A simple reflection of all women’s relationships with their breasts (the big and the small) and most importantly, it is her relationship with her tits that makes the love/hate affair with our bodies far more interesting than if we told it ourselves.

As a woman in her 40s who attends her yearly mammogram with a sense of potential dread, I love and appreciate Hayden’s take on our tits and what they mean to us. I love that she is unafraid to show the bad and the good of a life that is particularly dominated by breasts. But most of all I appreciate the strength it took her to put drawing pen to paper and create a biography that we can all relate to.

Yeah, it really is that good.

I give it 5 tits up.