🔗 Share this article

You wouldn’t believe it, Jessie J remarks. There she was readying for her comeback record in eight years, deeply enamored with her recent boyfriend, and finally the mother of a toddler after dealing with conception issues for ten years, riding high. Suddenly in spring she was found to have breast cancer.

The artist, birth name Jessica Cornish, is famous for speaking her mind. The LP, the provocatively titled album, was intended as an open book, tackling every ounce of devastation she’d experienced since she last made an album (a gynecological condition, pregnancy loss, failed relationships, emotional abuse, suicidal thoughts) with characteristic openness. The first single, the song No Secrets, was launched in the spring. But by then there was a mighty secret. Her diagnosis. Later follow-up track, Living My Best Life, was released in May and Cornish was speaking publicly about how she was thriving, while all the while living with her cancer. Subsequently she shared the news, and in early July she had a mastectomy.

She offers me her best “Seriously?” expression. “I put out with a song called No Secrets. I’m conducting every press talk, and they’re, like, ‘So what’s new with you?’ and I respond, ‘Uh, nothing really’” the singer has just had to cancel tour dates because she’s still waiting for cosmetic procedures.

We’re at a studio in the capital. She is dressed in a tan faux-leather coat, jeans with detailed white appliqués, off-white boots and large glasses. Think biker chic meets 70s singer aesthetic. “I feel like I’m in the seventies and I should have a partner with a mustache.” A biker reference, I say, referencing the movie. “They used to call me that!” She beams. She is quick, irreverent and blunt. She says she has always fancied doing comedy and is planning to attempt her initial standup show next year. “I enjoy humor. During performances I basically roast the fans.”

Personal Battles and News

She was planning an slot at the Baftas when she noticed an abnormality. “I promptly visited to get it looked at, had an test, and they told me, ‘It looks like nothing; you’ve got really good dense breast tissue.’ And I was, like, ‘Yet I sense it. My arm hurts and pins and needles in my hands whenever I wake up.’ And they replied, ‘We should biopsy it?’ The date was March 28, the following my birthday.” It was a weekend eve. The physician told her if it was bad news she’d reach out on the Monday. By then the singer had convinced herself it was fine. The way she tells it, it was just bad timing to get cancer when she had a busy schedule.

“Just two weeks before from launching this thing after eight years without an album and an extended break. And she [the doctor] texted and said, ‘Can you talk at six?’ And I assumed, ‘Oh, it’s a Zoom, it won’t be anything.’ So I log in believing it’s all going to be good, and she informs me, ‘You might want to sit.’ That sympathetic voice? And she reveals, ‘I’m so, so sorry but your biopsy results have shown high-grade cancer cells.’” What was your reaction? “I answered, ‘That’s unfortunate. What awful timing.’ Immediately I felt was, ‘I have to survive for my boy.’”

Some men find me challenging due to my self-awareness

She considered the operation terrifying and absurd. “I dislike anesthesia. They lead you. You know when you have emergency surgery you are wheeled, but then I just strolled down with a hospital gown and my backside out. It felt surreal.” But, Cornish says, she’s been fortunate. Without chemo or radio, just the surgery. “Cancer is awful, but yet I’m grateful it was caught soon. The surgery happened recently and my affected breast now looks like a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” A further beam. “I got to keep the nipple, though.”

The subsequent surgery is therapeutic and aesthetic. Her boobs, she remarks, are now “different sizes. The implant is larger than before. How rude! I felt, why make it worse, I’m already having a difficult experience. So rude! Ironically I said I’d not undergo augmentation because I’ve got OCD, and I know they’d never be perfect. Cancer ruined that plan.”

Previous Struggles

The singer is accustomed to medical issues. She believes her attitude toward illness has been so positive because she’s familiar with medical emergencies. Frequently they align with career highs, functioning as a wake-up call, or punch in the stomach, to remind her not to assume everything is fine. “Truly, I feel life goes, ‘You having a good time? Take a seat.’ From a young age, it has always gone alongside achievements for me; something severe or obscure has happened to my health.”

She takes me back to her youth, already starting her career starring in the London theater in Whistle Down the Wind (she was cast at the age of nine years old). That’s when she was diagnosed with the medical problem a syndrome, which can cause a rapid pulse as well as vertigo and irregular beats. “I rehearsed between visits on an drip, and going back into hospital at night.” She fast-forwards six years, and young Jessica has entered the girl group Soul Deep while attending the academy. “I signed my initial contract, and I had a cerebral event. Then when I was about to put out music in the year 2020 I had a car crash and my larynx moved up and I couldn’t sing for a twelve months.”

Wow, I say, hold on, I can’t keep up. At just 17? She nods|agrees