You couldn’t make it up, Jessie J remarks. There she was preparing for her new album launch in nearly a decade, deeply enamored with her current love, and finally the mom to a little one after struggling to conceive for ten years, on top of the world. Then in March she was found to have cancer in her breast.
The artist, birth name J. Cornish, is renowned for telling it as it is. The LP, her latest release, was meant as an candid account, addressing every bit of hardship she’d endured since she last recorded music (a gynecological condition, miscarriage, broken romances, psychological manipulation, mental health struggles) with characteristic openness. The lead track, No Secrets, was released in the spring. But by then there existed a huge secret. The cancer. Later second single, her song Living My Best Life, debuted in late spring and she was talking to press about how she was living her best life, while all the while living with the disease. Four weeks after she disclosed her condition, and in early July she underwent breast removal surgery.
She gives me her best “What the fuck?” expression. “I release with a song called No Secrets. I’m conducting every interview, and they’re, like, ‘What’s happening?’ and I answer, ‘Uh, nothing really’” she has just had to cancel tour dates because she’s awaiting cosmetic procedures.
We meet at a photo studio in the capital. She is wearing a light brown synthetic jacket, blue jeans with ornate white designs, cream boots and big frames. Picture rocker vibe meets 70s singer aesthetic. “As if I’m in the 70s and I should have a partner with a mustache.” Like the film, I say, thinking of the film. “I was nicknamed that in school!” She beams. Cornish is sharp-witted, irreverent and blunt. She says she has always fancied doing comedy and is aiming for her initial standup show in the coming year. “I like entertaining. On stage I basically roast the fans.”
Personal Battles and News
Cornish was planning an performance at the Baftas when she found a lump. “I promptly visited to get it looked at, had an scan, and they told me, ‘It looks like nothing; your tissue is healthy.’ And I insisted, ‘However, it’s there. I have arm pain and numbness in my fingers whenever I rise.’ And they suggested, ‘Well, let’s just do a biopsy?’ That was 28 March, the post-birthday.” It was a Friday. The doctor told her if it was concerning she’d call on the Monday. By then she had persuaded herself it was fine. The way she describes it, it was simply too inconvenient to face illness when she had many commitments.
“Just two weeks before from launching this thing after a long hiatus and four years without a single. And she contacted me and said, ‘Is six okay?’ And I thought, ‘It’s virtual, probably routine.’ So I log in expecting it’s all going to be good, and she says, ‘Are you sitting down?.’ That sympathetic voice? And she reveals, ‘I’m so, so sorry but your biopsy results have shown aggressive cancer.’” How did you respond? “I answered, ‘Oh, that’s not ideal, is it?. The timing is terrible.’ My initial thought was, ‘I have to survive for my boy.’”
Some men find me challenging due to my self-awareness
She considered the operation frightening and surreal. “I dislike anesthesia. They walk you down. During crises you are wheeled, but this time I just marched with a medical attire and my rear exposed. Like a dystopian scene.” But, she notes, she’s been lucky. No chemotherapy or radiation, just the surgery. “Cancer is awful, but yet Luckily it was detected early. I had the mastectomy a few months back and my one side now looks like a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” She smiles again. “The nipple was preserved.”
The follow-up procedure is therapeutic and aesthetic. Her boobs, she remarks, are now “different sizes. The size doesn’t match. How rude! I reflected, don’t add insult to injury, I’m already having a difficult experience. How offensive! Amusingly I said I’d never get my boobs done because I’ve got OCD, and I know they’d never be perfect. My plans were disrupted.”
Previous Struggles
She is accustomed to medical issues. She believes her attitude toward illness has been so optimistic because she’s familiar with health crises. They have often coincided with professional successes, acting as a reminder, or shock, to remind her not to take anything for granted. “Honestly, I feel the universe whispers, ‘Things going well? Hold on.’ From a young age, it has often paired with high points for me; a major or strange event has impacted my body.”
She takes me back to her 11-year-old self, already starting her career starring in the West End in Whistle Down the Wind (she was cast at the age of nine years old). That’s when she was found to have the medical problem Wolff-Parkinson-White syndrome, which can cause a fast heartbeat as well as vertigo and heart flutters. “I was going in and out of rehearsals on an intravenous line, and returning to the hospital at night.” She jumps ahead half a dozen years, and young Jessica has entered the girl group the group while enrolled in the academy. “I just got my first record deal, and I had a brain incident. Then when I was planning to release songs in recently I had a collision and my larynx moved up and I couldn’t sing for a long period.”
Wow, I say, wait, I am overwhelmed. You really had a stroke at 17? She nods|agrees
