The Times Magazine 25feet, and she was too skinny and not enough
breast”, her son, Luca Dotti, told Vanity Fair in
- See? No one is immune. Except perhaps
Gwyneth Paltrow, who shared a picture of
herself naked in the garden to celebrate her
48th birthday (and flog Goop body butter)
a few weeks ago, so perhaps there’s something
in those Jade vagina eggs after all.
When I worked as a fashion assistant in my
early twenties, dressing models and celebrities
for photoshoots, I saw that feminine ideal in
the flesh every day. I’ve seen more “perfect”
naked bodies than I’ve had hot dinners, and
regretted most of the hot dinners as a result.
Over the years I’ve honed little comedy bits
about body parts that I perform for friends
and colleagues. They started as defence
mechanisms, putting me in on the joke about
my body neuroses – one day my knees (potato
smileys), the next my shape (Mr Wobbly
Man from Noddy). And the more I repeated
breast cancer in women from 12 per cent to
69 per cent, and the likelihood of ovarian
cancer from 1.3 to 17 per cent (the BRCA1
mutation is even worse). It’s less dangerous
for men, but raises the risk of prostate cancer,
and my sister’s diagnosis meant that my
father’s prostate cancer was discovered early
enough for his treatment to be curative.
I went for my genetic test alone, on the
way to work one morning, a few months
after my 30th birthday. I hadn’t expected
that, before they took my blood, an oncologist
would sit me down and prepare me for my
new reality if the coin toss didn’t land in my
favour, discussing the merits of an elective
double mastectomy (the sooner the better)
and the invitation I’d receive to come in for an
oophorectomy when I turned 40 (so I should
plan any children accordingly). You know that
moment before a haircut when your hair’s
never looked better? Weeping in the shower
each day as I waited for my results, I realised- vain creature that I am – exactly how much
I didn’t want to lose the breasts that I’ve hated
for no reason at all for the past two decades.
After a single mastectomy and
chemotherapy, my sister had an elective
mastectomy on her other, cancer-free breast,
to give her the greatest chance of stopping the
cancer from coming back (she’s now cancer-
free and has rescheduled her Covid-cancelled
wedding for next spring). Instead of her
breasts – our breasts, really, as we’ve inherited
very similar bodies – she has implants, which
are perfectly round and firm. Our bodies
are different now in a way that they weren’t
before, through no choice of our own. She’d
like her old breasts – our breasts – back. I got
to keep them when I won the coin toss that
my sister lost. So I thought that now might
be a good time to stop hating them – and
the rest of my body.
By the end of lockdown, and six months
spent very quietly and mostly alone in my
one-bedroom flat wondering whether I’d ever
be naked in front of another person again,
I’d decided that life needed to be lived a bit
more bravely. This wasn’t about taking my
clothes off in front of anyone else. I needed
to do something so that, each morning, when
I saw myself starkers, I wouldn’t mentally
chastise myself or run through the checklist
of my flaws – quarantine stone and all – and
could learn to feel good naked.
I needed to see myself differently, to take
my body out of the context of my everyday
life, of other women in the changing room
of my local yoga studio or Victoria’s Secret
models, whom I happen to have seen naked
(and who were often quick to point out a tiny
bit of cellulite or a scar, or whatever it was
that they disliked about their own bodies).
How better to get a fresh perspective than
to turn my body into art?
them, the more they felt like fact. I laughed off
my insecure body hang-ups from niggles to
full-blown obsessions.
I spent my teens thinking my life would
be better if only my acne would clear up, my
twenties thinking my life would be better if
only my thighs were smaller. And I started
my thirties wishing I had the body I had- the body I hated, the body I hid – in my
twenties. Well, it’s all downhill from here,
right? It’s certainly downhill for my boobs,
ba-dum-tching! My most frequently repeated
bit is the one in which I compare my not-
quite-matching boobs to boss eyes: one’s
looking at you, one’s looking for you.
In December 2017, when my sister was 32,
she found a lump in her breast. It was cancer
and the first we knew about the BRCA2 gene
mutation in my family. Children of a carrier
have a 50/50 chance of inheriting the
mutation, which takes the likelihood of