You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J says. At that moment gearing up for her comeback record in eight years, blissfully happy with her recent boyfriend, and finally the parent to a young child after facing fertility challenges for ten years, on top of the world. Then in March she was told she had breast cancer.
The singer-songwriter, birth name Jessica Cornish, is renowned for being brutally honest. The LP, Don’t Tease Me With a Good Time, was intended as an candid account, dealing with every moment of pain she’d endured since she last recorded music (endometrial issues, losing a baby, unsuccessful partnerships, gaslighting, suicide) with her usual frankness. The initial release, No Secrets, was launched in April. But by then there existed a huge secret. Her diagnosis. Later second single, her song Living My Best Life, was released in late spring and she was speaking publicly about how she was thriving, while all the while coping with her cancer. Four weeks after she shared the news, and in the start of summer she had a mastectomy.
She offers me her best “Are you kidding?” look. “I come out with a song called No Secrets. I’m conducting every media appearance, and they’re, like, ‘So what’s new with you?’ and I respond, ‘Erm, yeah, nothing …’” she has just had to cancel tour dates because she’s yet to undergo follow-up surgery.
We’re at a photography studio in London. She is dressed in a light brown synthetic jacket, jeans with ornate white designs, cream boots and oversized specs. Imagine biker chic meets 1970s Nana Mouskouri. “As if I’m in the 70s and I should have a man with facial hair.” Easy Rider, I say, referencing the movie. “They used to call me that!” She smiles. She is sharp-witted, unfiltered and direct. She says she has always fancied doing comedy and is planning to attempt her first comedy performance next year. “I enjoy humor. On stage I often tease the fans.”
Medical Challenges and Discovery
Cornish was getting ready for an appearance at the ceremony when she discovered a mass. “I quickly sought to get it looked at, had an scan, and they said, ‘It appears fine; your tissue is healthy.’ And I insisted, ‘But I can feel it. My arm hurts and numbness in my fingers whenever I rise.’ And they said, ‘We should biopsy it?’ That was 28 March, the post-birthday.” It was a weekend eve. The specialist told her if it was concerning she’d call on the start of the week. By then the singer had persuaded herself it was okay. The way she describes it, it was just bad timing to get cancer when she had so much on.
“Just two weeks before from releasing the album after a long hiatus and an extended break. And she contacted me and said, ‘Are you free at six?’ And I assumed, ‘Oh, it’s a Zoom, it won’t be anything.’ So I jump on the Zoom believing it’s all going to be positive, and she goes, ‘Please take a seat.’ You know that sad tone they use? And she reveals, ‘I regret to inform you but your reports have indicated malignant cells.’” What was your reaction? “I replied, ‘That’s unfortunate. The timing is terrible.’ My initial thought was, ‘My child depends on me.’”
I’ve been labeled difficult for knowing myself
She considered the operation frightening and surreal. “I fear going under. They lead you. In urgent cases you go on a gurney, but then I just walked with a medical attire and my bum hanging out. Like a dystopian scene.” But, Cornish says, she’s been fortunate. No chemo, no radiotherapy, just the surgery. “It’s terrible, but however Thank fuck I found it early. The surgery happened a few months back and my right breast now resembles a odd shape.” A further beam. “I got to keep the nipple, though.”
The subsequent surgery is therapeutic and aesthetic. Her breasts, she notes, are now “different sizes. They didn’t do an implant as small as my original. How rude! I reflected, why make it worse, I’m already having a difficult experience. How offensive! Amusingly I said I’d not undergo augmentation because I’ve got perfectionism, and I know they’d never be flawless. Cancer ruined that plan.”
Previous Struggles
The singer is familiar with health problems. She feels her outlook on her diagnosis has been so positive because she’s familiar with health crises. They have often coincided with professional successes, functioning as a wake-up call, or shock, to highlight not to take anything for granted. “Honestly, I feel fate says, ‘Things going well? Hold on.’ Since childhood, it has always gone alongside high points for me; a major or strange event has happened to my health.”
She reminisces to her 11-year-old self, already beginning starring in the stage in Whistle Down the Wind (she was cast at the age of nine). That’s when she was diagnosed with the heart condition Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which can cause a fast heartbeat as well as dizziness and irregular beats. “I was going in and out of rehearsals on an drip, and returning to the hospital at night.” She jumps ahead several years, and teenage Jess has joined the female band Soul Deep while enrolled in the performing arts school. “I signed my initial contract, and I had a cerebral event. Then when I was about to put out music in recently I had a collision and my larynx moved up and I couldn’t sing for a long period.”
Hey, I say, hold on, I am overwhelmed. At just 17? She nods|agrees
