In April 2021, the Bluetooth blunder all romance readers fear most happened to me in while I was in the hospital recovering from a preventative mastectomy. With COVID-19 vaccines still difficult to come by, I spent most of my hospital stay alone in a dimly lit room, plowing through the array of romance audiobooks that I had downloaded onto my iPhone. While the nurse was checking the status of my surgical drains, my traitorous phone disconnected from my Bluetooth headphones and amplified my audiobook throughout the room.
Though not a steamy scene, it was a scene. Characters were sharing furtive glances, imagining what would happen if they closed the distance between them and shared a kiss. It certainly wasn’t a moment I would’ve chosen to play on speaker.
“Fun! A book,” my nurse said, completely unruffled. She was a total pro. Meanwhile, I rained apologies all over her as I fumbled with my phone.
Once she was gone, I searched my bed for my rogue earbud, careful to avoid movements that sent searing pains through my chest. Then, the voice beside me asked, “What book was that?” Those were the first words exchanged with my roommate behind the curtain. Before that, she’d merely been the person responsible for the occasional whir of a bed raising and lowering on the other side of the pink curtain separating us.
I rattled off all the books I’d downloaded for my hospital stay: “Take a Hint, Dani Brown,” by Talia Hibbert, “You Deserve Each Other” by Sarah Hogle, and “The Happy Ever After Playlist” by . “Oh, those are on my list,” she said. “I read romance, too.
” Like so many women, I read in 2020. I mean dozens. Heaps.
I had romance coming out of my ears. I simply couldn’t get enough of their happy endings and incendiary arm grazes replete with yearning. I only had time for novels where good things happened to good people and heroines spoke freely about their bodies and their sexualities.
Unlike most women, however, I wasn’t only reading romance during the early days of COVID for a mental vacation from the indignities of driving to a far-flung Target in search of single-ply toilet paper based on a questionable NextDoor tip. (Though that was certainly a bonus). I was reading romance to soothe my heart and mind as I prepared for a and weighed the pros and cons of sparing my nipples.
Being a carrier of the puts me at a significantly higher risk of developing and in my lifetime. Back in 2020, all tests indicated that I was healthy and cancer free. Still, I couldn’t shake the “what if.
” Namely: So, on the advice of my doctors, I began the overwhelming process of planning my double mastectomy. Redesigning your own breasts within the (decidedly unsexy) bounds of medical science is an odd task. While so many people who undergo this procedure have little choice in the matter, I was choosing : the date, the material, the size and the shape of my new, artificial breasts.
I was even choosing whether to lose or keep my nipples, a decision that comes with some potential medical risks. Turns out that if you are planning a prophylactic mastectomy, the world is your oyster — but only if you enjoy oysters as I do, which is to say, you don’t at all and think they look a bit grisly set on ice in the middle of a picnic table. Each of these decisions is deeply , and therefore, deeply isolating.
A person’s relationship to their breasts and their component parts isn’t exactly virtual happy-hour fodder. (Again, this was early 2020, when we still attended gender reveal parties via Zoom, and I would slip conversational nipples into small talk while the party waited in gallery view for the appearance of a blue or pink cupcake.) So, as I fixated on the pros and cons of nipples while faced with a life without physical sensation in my breasts, I turned to the only women I knew who were equally as eager to discuss their breasts: women in romance novels.
While the romance genre varies widely in its depictions of sex — from the mere implication of intimacy to explicit on-page descriptions — it is mostly consistent in the ways it centers women’s physical experience of sexual attraction and desire. I’ve read countless descriptions of women noting specific states of nipple arousal upon meeting the strapping hero or striking heroine — from perky to pinched, purpled to pebbled, puckered to even plumped. Whereas most women don’t pay close attention to the pair of nipples on their chest, the nipples of romantic fiction all seem to have lives of their own — in part, because authors rarely shy away from depicting their heroine’s physical experience of attraction.
As a result, their characters feel empowered by their sexuality, not embarrassed of it, and they can embrace it boldly and without shame. In reading about these women, whose struggles, zip codes and sometimes charmingly impractical day jobs weren’t like my own, I reveled in how they were each boldly taking control of their sexuality and being rewarded for it. They were looking for love, yes, but they were also searching for identity and self-acceptance.
These women were teaching themselves that love was a worthwhile pursuit and that they were worthy recipients of it, exactly as they were. After my diagnosis, I’d begun to resent my breasts. I found myself slumping in my chair and gained an affinity for sleeveless summer turtlenecks.
I looked at them in the mirror with anger and dread. They were my enemy. And though I was mounting a preemptive attack, I blamed them for forcing my hand.
But reading romance — a genre brimming with optimism and frank discussions of women’s bodies, self-love, and pleasure — gave me permission to see my breasts as more than ticking time bombs. They gave me the language I needed to discuss my own relationship with my body and what I was afraid of losing: beauty, sensuality and self-confidence. Romance authors didn’t punish, minimize or deride the women in their novels for wishing to feel sexual and for wanting to love themselves and their bodies.
They validated those feelings in their warm, joyful stories, and in doing so, they validated me. I judged myself harshly for caring about these things. I told myself it was vapid and shallow.
Smart, confident women didn’t care about the shape of their breasts, I told myself. But romance authors didn’t punish, minimize or deride the women in their novels for wishing to feel sexual and for wanting to love themselves and their bodies. They validated those feelings in their warm, joyful stories, and in doing so, they validated me.
When I wrote a romance novel of my own, I centered the story on a post-mastectomy heroine whose surgery is only the beginning of her journey for love and self-acceptance rather than a threat looming in the distance. Through my heroine, Alison, I was able to unpack my feelings on living with BRCA, recovery and existing without nipples, all while giving her the happy ending a 2020 version of myself so desperately needed to read. In 2021, I made my own happy ending.
I underwent a preventative double mastectomy and significantly lowered my risk of developing breast cancer. At first, it was challenging to exist in skin that felt unfamiliar, to treat myself well, and to recover with parts that felt physically numb and jarring to the rest of my body. But I had language to discuss this dichotomy between the breasts I remembered and the ones that were safe but sensationless.
I had heroines who reminded me it was OK to care about these things and that self-love would come with time. And it did. I found a who created an artistic floral design to cover my scarring, and my post-mastectomy breasts became something new and more beautiful.
They became mine again, and I changed my own narrative — all thanks to the narratives that sustained me. Ellie Palmer is the author of out August 2024..
