You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J remarks. There she was gearing up for her comeback record in nearly a decade, deeply enamored with her newish partner, and at long last the parent to a young child after dealing with conception issues for ten years, feeling invincible. Suddenly in spring she was found to have breast cancer.
The artist, real name Jessica Cornish, is known for telling it as it is. The record, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, was intended as an transparent story, dealing with every bit of hardship she’d endured since she last made an album (a gynecological condition, miscarriage, broken romances, emotional abuse, suicide) with her usual frankness. The first single, her single No Secrets, was dropped in April. But by then there existed a huge secret. Her diagnosis. Then second single, her song Living My Best Life, came out in May and she was giving interviews about how she was thriving, while still secretly living with breast cancer. Subsequently she went public, and in the start of summer she received surgical treatment.
She gives me her best “Seriously?” glance. “I release with a song called the track No Secrets. I’m giving every press talk, and they inquire, ‘Any updates?’ and I’m, like, ‘Uh, nothing really’” the singer has just had to call off performances because she’s yet to undergo follow-up surgery.
We meet at a photo studio in the capital. She is sporting a tan faux-leather coat, jeans with elaborate white patches, off-white boots and oversized specs. Picture rocker vibe meets 1970s Nana Mouskouri. “As if I’m in the seventies and I should have a partner with a mustache.” Easy Rider, I say, recalling the film. “They used to call me that!” She smiles. Jessie is fast-thinking, irreverent and filter-free. She says she has always been interested in humor and is hoping to make her initial standup show in the coming year. “I enjoy humor. During performances I often tease the crowd.”
Health Struggles and Diagnosis
Cornish was preparing for an slot at the Baftas when she discovered a mass. “I promptly visited to get it examined, had an test, and they told me, ‘It seems benign; you’ve got really good dense breast tissue.’ And I was, like, ‘But I can feel it. I have arm pain and pins and needles in my hands whenever I get up.’ And they suggested, ‘Well, let’s just do a biopsy?’ The date was March 28, the post-birthday.” It was a weekend eve. The physician told her if it was serious she’d contact on the start of the week. By then she had convinced herself it was okay. The way she tells it, it was inopportune to receive a diagnosis when she had so much on.
“We’re two weeks away from releasing the album after a long hiatus and four years without a single. And she [the doctor] texted and said, ‘Can you talk at six?’ And I assumed, ‘It’s virtual, probably routine.’ So I log in thinking it’s all going to be fine, and she goes, ‘Are you sitting down?.’ You know that sad tone they use? And she continues, ‘Unfortunately but your biopsy results have shown aggressive cancer.’” What did you say? “I answered, ‘Well, that’s not great. That’s not fucking great timing.’ The first thing I thought was, ‘I have to survive for my boy.’”
Men have called me difficult because I’m a strong person who understands who I am
She considered the operation terrifying and absurd. “I fear going under. They walk you down. You know when you have emergency surgery you are wheeled, but then I just strolled down with a medical attire and my bum hanging out. Like a dystopian scene.” But, she notes, she’s been blessed. No chemotherapy or radiation, just the op. “Cancer is awful, but yet I’m grateful it was caught soon. The surgery happened four months ago and my affected breast now resembles a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” She smiles again. “At least the nipple remains.”
The subsequent surgery is therapeutic and aesthetic. Her boobs, she notes, are now “different sizes. The size doesn’t match. So inconsiderate! I thought, no need to bully me, I’m already having a difficult experience. How offensive! It’s funny because I said I’d not undergo augmentation because I’ve got obsessive tendencies, and I know they’d never be perfect. Illness changed that.”
A History of Health Challenges
Cornish is no stranger to illness. She feels her attitude toward illness has been so upbeat because she’s familiar with physical challenges. They have often coincided with professional successes, acting as a reminder, or shock, to remind her not to take anything for granted. “Truly, I feel fate says, ‘You having a good time? Sit down.’ From a young age, it has always gone alongside moments of success for me; a major or strange event has happened to my health.”
She reminisces to her 11-year-old self, already starting her career featuring in the stage in Whistle Down the Wind (she was cast at the age of nine years old). That’s when she was diagnosed with the heart condition Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which can cause a fast heartbeat as well as vertigo and palpitations. “I was going in and out of rehearsals on an IV drip, and returning to the hospital at night.” She jumps ahead half a dozen years, and 17-year-old Jess has become part of the girl group Soul Deep while enrolled in the academy. “I just got my first record deal, and I had a stroke. Then when I was about to put out music in the year 2020 I had a automobile accident and my voice box shifted and I was unable to vocalize for a long period.”
Hey, I say, slow down, I need a moment. You really had a stroke at 17? She nods|agrees
