A Boob's Life
How America's Obsession Shaped Me—and You
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
A Boob’s Life explores the surprising truth about women’s most popular body part with vulnerable, witty frankness and true nuggets of American culture that will resonate with everyone who has breasts—or loves them.
Author Leslie Lehr wants to talk about boobs. She’s gone from size AA to DDD and everything between, from puberty to motherhood, enhancement to cancer, and beyond. And she’s not alone—these are classic life stages for women today.
At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob’s Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman’s body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women’s liberation movement and moving to the current feminist dialogue and what it means to be a woman. Her insightful and clever writing analyzes how America’s obsession with the female form has affected her own life’s journey and the psyche of all women today.
From her prize-winning fiction to her viral New York Times Modern Love essay, exploring the challenges facing contemporary women has been Lehr’s life-long passion. A Boob’s Life, her first project since breast cancer treatment, continues this mission, taking readers on a wildly informative, deeply personal, and utterly relatable journey. No matter your gender, you’ll never view this sexy and sacred body part the same way again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist and screenwriter Lehr (Wife Goes On) blends memoir, history, and cultural criticism in this witty and incisive look at American attitudes toward women's breasts. She tracks the evolution of her feelings about her own breasts from pubescence to flat-chested young adulthood, breastfeeding, plastic surgery (aiming for a B cup, she ended up size 32D), and surviving breast cancer. Lehr's appealing sense of humor runs throughout, as does her sharp analysis of broader social issues such as the messages girls receive about being smart versus being pretty, the "bro culture and tribe mentality" of the Senate Judiciary Committee during Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court confirmation hearings, the marketing techniques of lingerie brands, and the censorship of women's breasts in movies and on social media platforms. Digressions on her father's collection of Playboy magazines, the history of the Hooters restaurant chain, and the popularity of breast augmentation surgery in the U.S. mingle with frank details about Lehr's battle with breast cancer and the stresses in women's lives that contribute to the disease, which, she notes, kills more than 42,000 American women every year. Lehr's engrossing and empathetic account will appeal to women of all ages.
