You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J states. At that moment preparing for her first album release in eight years, ecstatically in love with her current love, and at long last the mother of a toddler after dealing with conception issues for ten years, riding high. Suddenly in March she was diagnosed with a breast cancer diagnosis.
The artist, real name Jessica Cornish, is famous for being brutally honest. The record, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, was meant as an transparent story, dealing with every moment of pain she’d experienced since she last recorded music (a gynecological condition, miscarriage, unsuccessful partnerships, emotional abuse, suicide) with typical candour. The lead track, her single No Secrets, was dropped in the spring. But by then there remained a major undisclosed truth. The cancer. Later next release, Living My Best Life, came out in late spring and Cornish was giving interviews about how she was enjoying life to the fullest, while all the while coping with her cancer. A month later she disclosed her condition, and in July she underwent breast removal surgery.
She gives me her best “Seriously?” glance. “I put out with a song called No Secrets. I’m conducting every press talk, and they inquire, ‘What’s happening?’ and I respond, ‘Well, not much…’” she has just had to postpone shows because she’s still waiting for reconstructive surgery.
Our interview takes place at a photography studio in the capital. She is sporting a beige fake-leather jacket, jeans with elaborate white patches, beige footwear and oversized specs. Imagine biker chic meets vintage look. “It seems like I’m in the seventies and I should have a boyfriend with a big tache.” A biker reference, I say, recalling the picture. “I was nicknamed that in school!” She beams. Jessie is fast-thinking, bold and blunt. She says she has always fancied doing comedy and is hoping to make her first comedy performance in the coming year. “I enjoy humor. During performances I basically roast the audience.”
Medical Challenges and Discovery
The artist was preparing for an appearance at the Baftas when she found a lump. “I immediately went to get it examined, had an test, and they were, like, ‘It looks like nothing; your breasts are normal.’ And I insisted, ‘Yet I sense it. I’ve got an achy arm and pins and needles in my hands whenever I get up.’ And they suggested, ‘We should biopsy it?’ That was 28 March, the post-birthday.” It was a Friday. The physician told her if it was serious she’d contact on the start of the week. By then the singer had convinced herself it was nothing. The way she describes it, it was simply too inconvenient to get cancer when she had a busy schedule.
“It was a fortnight prior from releasing the album after years away and four years without a single. And she contacted me and said, ‘Can you talk at six?’ And I assumed, ‘Oh, it’s a Zoom, it won’t be anything.’ So I join the call expecting it’s all going to be good, and she says, ‘Please take a seat.’ That sympathetic voice? And she reveals, ‘Unfortunately but your reports have indicated high-grade cancer cells.’” What did you say? “I replied, ‘That’s unfortunate. The timing is terrible.’ My initial thought was, ‘I can’t die because my son needs me.’”
Some men find me challenging due to my self-awareness
She viewed the procedure terrifying and absurd. “I fear going under. They lead you. You know when you have emergency surgery you go on a gurney, but this time I just walked with a medical attire and my rear exposed. Like a dystopian scene.” But, Cornish says, she’s been blessed. No chemo, no radiotherapy, just the op. “It’s terrible, but yet Thank fuck I found it early. I had the mastectomy four months ago and my affected breast now looks like a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” Another grin. “The nipple was preserved.”
The subsequent surgery is both medical and cosmetic. Her breasts, she notes, are now “uneven. The size doesn’t match. So inconsiderate! I felt, no need to bully me, I’m already having a difficult experience. How offensive! Amusingly I said I’d avoid breast surgery because I’ve got OCD, and I know they’d never be perfect. Illness changed that.”
A History of Health Challenges
The singer is familiar with health problems. She believes her attitude toward illness has been so optimistic because she’s experienced in health crises. They have often coincided with professional successes, serving as a tap on the shoulder, or punch in the stomach, to make her recall not to take anything for granted. “Frankly, I feel the universe whispers, ‘Enjoying yourself? Take a seat.’ Since childhood, it has always gone alongside moments of success for me; a major or strange event has impacted my body.”
She takes me back to her childhood, already making her debut performing in the London theater in the production (she was cast at the age of 9). That’s when she was told about the cardiac issue a syndrome, which can cause a rapid pulse as well as vertigo and heart flutters. “I was going in and out of rehearsals on an drip, and going back into hospital at night.” She fast-forwards half a dozen years, and teenage Jess has entered the female band Soul Deep while enrolled in the academy. “I secured a deal, and I had a brain incident. Then when I was planning to release songs in recently I had a collision and my voice box shifted and I couldn’t sing for a year.”
Hey, I say, slow down, I need a moment. At just 17? She nods|agrees
