Review by Melissa Frederick
Jennifer Hayden’s The Story of My Tits (Top Shelf, Oct. 2015) is an experience. At its base, this graphic memoir is exactly what it claims to be—an account of the rise and fall of a woman’s breasts. (The “rise” comes late, as Hayden was physically a late bloomer, while the “fall” comes in the form of breast cancer, which requires her to get radical surgery.) Hayden’s focus is, shall we say, unorthodox and brings with it all the fun sensations, vulgar witticisms, and brutal truths one would expect from a book about boobs written by the owner of a pair. But truth be told, the book is about more than that. A lot more.
First things first, though: for any readers out there who aren’t familiar with the term, a graphic memoir is an autobiography both written and drawn. It’s like a graphic novel except that the story it tells is nonfictional. The drawing style and most of the storytelling conventions usually come from the comic book world. I’m not going to get into a big debate over the validity of the graphic memoir as a genre or the comparative value of longer graphic works versus comic books versus traditional literature, although I would refer anyone who still wants to have such a debate to the list of 266 popular graphic memoirs on Goodreads. Suffice it to say that this relatively new form of autobiography has quickly become a repository for a wide range of lived experience, and Hayden’s work is a wonderful example of how even the most private, domestic lives can provide raw material for epic tales of birth and death, fantasy and drudgery, confusion, hope, and loss.
To call Hayden’s story “unflinching”—as some critics have—is almost to give the author too little credit. Chronicling her own life from birth to the present, Hayden manages to create that dense and ambiguous sense of life as it happens, with all the imaginings a person has along the way: life as you want it to happen, as you think it did happen, as you hope it never happens but still have a terrible gnawing sense in your gut that it will. That’s not to say the narrative itself is depressing. In fact, Hayden adds a light and jokey feel to virtually every frame of the story. Early on, the anxiety of waiting for tits to grow is cut by tales of hanging with a childhood friend as they stuff their bras full of rocks. Then come nipples that transmit homing signals to nearby teenage boys and a playfully springy lesson in learning to put in a diaphragm.
After the boobs (finally!) make their appearance, there’s young adulthood, when dilemmas ranging from the absurd to the nauseating have to be worked out. Parental infidelity! Fighting with a boyfriend over a box of spaghetti! Late nights spying on screwing neighbors! Job interviews! Shoulder pads! And lots, lots more! As readers, we get to know Hayden’s mother father, brother, sister, friends, boyfriends, and in-laws so intimately that when “more” comes—the really awful, life-shattering more—we feel as though we’re living alongside Hayden as she navigates the big, bad, brilliant world.
I should mention here that The Story of My Tits is not for the faint-hearted. I sobbed my way pretty solidly through the last half of the book. Also, one moment during Hayden’s account of her surgery made me stop reading altogether to keep from passing out. I say this not to criticize the book, however. In fact, I appreciate Hayden’s work all the more for not pulling any punches. Her use of stories, symbols, dreams, and diagrams all fit together to produce a complex narrative that’s real, funny, brutal, beautiful, and clear all at once.
This style is nowhere more evident than in her portrayal of a long stretch of losses as well as in her exploration of the experience of being ill. One analogy Hayden returns to over and over likens a sick person to a deer protected from hunters by a territorial king. The deer remains alone in a dark forest with a sign around its neck. Noli me tangere, the sign says: Don’t touch me. It’s a powerful image, embodying the fear, isolation, and lack of control that comes when the body breaks. But Hayden’s story of the deer is not meant to be a permanent home. It’s only a way station—a moment to be faced, yes, but also to be suffered through and left behind once the time is right.
Hayden guides her readers through the territory of illness and death just as gracefully as she lays out her unexpected, slightly off-kilter life. What’s left after the journey is a sense of perspective: that life is a mishmash of different events that we have to cobble together and make sense of, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Even after our hearts take a hit, or we leave behind our body parts, we still have control over the pen in our hands.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
