You couldn’t make it up, the singer says. At that moment preparing for her comeback record in nearly a decade, deeply enamored with her recent boyfriend, and at long last the mother of a toddler after facing fertility challenges for a decade, on top of the world. Suddenly in March she was diagnosed with cancer in her breast.
The singer-songwriter, birth name J. Cornish, is known for telling it as it is. The LP, the provocatively titled album, was intended as an candid account, tackling every moment of pain she’d experienced since she last made an album (a gynecological condition, losing a baby, broken romances, psychological manipulation, mental health struggles) with her usual frankness. The initial release, No Secrets, was dropped in the spring. But by then there was a mighty secret. The cancer. Later second single, the upbeat Living My Best Life, debuted in May and she was talking to press about how she was enjoying life to the fullest, while still secretly dealing with the disease. A month later she went public, and in the start of summer she had a mastectomy.
She offers me her best “Are you kidding?” expression. “I come out with a song called the track No Secrets. I’m conducting every press talk, and they inquire, ‘So what’s new with you?’ and I’m, like, ‘Well, not much…’” the singer has just had to cancel tour dates because she’s still waiting for cosmetic procedures.
We meet at a photography studio in the capital. She is sporting a tan faux-leather coat, denim trousers with detailed white appliqués, cream boots and oversized specs. Picture motorcycle style meets 70s singer aesthetic. “It seems like I’m in the 1970s and I should have a partner with a mustache.” Like the film, I say, referencing the picture. “They used to call me that!” She smiles. Cornish is fast-thinking, irreverent and blunt. She says she has always wanted to try comedy and is hoping to make her standup debut soon. “I enjoy humor. On stage I frequently joke about the audience.”
Medical Challenges and Discovery
She was getting ready for an appearance at the ceremony when she found a lump. “I promptly visited to get it examined, had an scan, and they said, ‘It looks like nothing; your tissue is healthy.’ And I responded, ‘Yet I sense it. I have arm pain and numbness in my fingers whenever I get up.’ And they suggested, ‘How about a biopsy?’ The date was March 28, the following my birthday.” It was a weekend eve. The physician told her if it was concerning she’d reach out on the start of the week. By then Cornish had persuaded herself it was nothing. The way she describes it, it was simply too inconvenient to receive a diagnosis when she had many commitments.
“Just two weeks before from launching this thing after eight years without an album and four years without a single. And the doctor messaged and said, ‘Is six okay?’ And I was, like, ‘A video call, likely minor.’ So I join the call believing it’s all going to be fine, and she goes, ‘Please take a seat.’ You know that sad tone they use? And she says, ‘I regret to inform you but your test results have come back as malignant cells.’” What did you say? “I answered, ‘That’s unfortunate. The timing is terrible.’ My initial thought was, ‘I can’t die because my son needs me.’”
I’ve been labeled difficult for knowing myself
She considered the operation terrifying and absurd. “I hate being put under. You’re escorted. In urgent cases you roll down in a bed, but then I just marched with a medical attire and my rear exposed. Like a dystopian scene.” But, she adds, she’s been blessed. No chemotherapy or radiation, just the procedure. “Cancer sucks, man, but you know what? I’m grateful it was caught soon. I had the mastectomy recently and my affected breast now appears as a grapefruit under a tight bedsheet.” A further beam. “The nipple was preserved.”
The follow-up procedure is for health and appearance. Her breasts, she remarks, are now “uneven. They didn’t do an implant as small as my original. How rude! I felt, don’t add insult to injury, I’m already having a hard period. How offensive! Amusingly I said I’d not undergo augmentation because I’ve got obsessive tendencies, and I know they’d never be perfect. Illness changed that.”
Past Medical Issues
Cornish is accustomed to medical issues. She feels her perspective on the cancer has been so upbeat because she’s used to medical emergencies. Many times they occur alongside professional successes, serving as a tap on the shoulder, or shock, to make her recall not to be complacent. “Honestly, I feel fate says, ‘You having a good time? Take a seat.’ From a young age, it has consistently accompanied moments of success for me; a major or strange event has impacted my body.”
She takes me back to her childhood, already making her debut featuring in the West End in Whistle Down the Wind (she was selected 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 rapid pulse as well as lightheadedness and heart flutters. “I was going in and out of rehearsals on an IV drip, and being readmitted at night.” She skips forward several years, and 17-year-old Jess has become part of the trio the group while studying at the academy. “I secured a deal, and I had a brain incident. Then when I was planning to release songs in 2020 I had a collision and my larynx moved up and I lost my voice for a year.”
Oi, I say, slow down, I need a moment. You really had a stroke at 17? She nods|agrees
