Nell Boeschenstein’s “A Few Words About Fake Breasts” is a personal essay that chronicles Boeschenstein’s struggle with breast reconstruction after a double mastectomy, and brings to light the contradictions between today’s feminist culture and society’s standards of beauty. The piece is a first person essay written in the second person. The intimacy of the emotions that Boeschenstein writes about are too personal to not be her own feelings, yet she explains that “first person never works” in her early attempts to put her thoughts on paper. The use of second person asks the reader to go through what Boeschenstein went through, and to consider her perspective with an attention that first person narratives can’t command. She employs several clever techniques to keep the second person impersonally personal; my favorite example being “Dr. Not-Bill-Pullman,” the plastic surgeon she couldn’t name without losing the generality that second person requires. Despite this, Boeschenstein includes many rich details that place the reader half-in and half-out of her life: we have little pieces of the puzzle, like descriptions of a place Boeschenstein has been, or a direct statement of her opinions (we know, for example, that she considers her butt to be her “best feature”). But at the same time, we don’t know the name of her mother, a main character in the story. The balance between detail and mystery partially shields Boeschenstein’s private life from scrutiny, while also giving away major things about her.
Boeschenstein uses a lot of contrast to help make her point, the clearest example of this being her use of euphemisms for the word “breast.” The rather childish monikers clash with the seriousness of the subject. In the first paragraph, she uses two silly-sounding nicknames while talking about how she’s about to undergo an invasive procedure in order to protect herself from a life-threatening disease:
“The last night you are alone with your original Lassies, you stand naked in front of a mirror in your studio apartment. You are thirty-one and will never be spending an evening with the girls like this again.”
The euphemisms purposefully don’t fit with the overall tone of the piece, both to draw attention to how uncomfortable thinking about breasts in terms other than immature nicknames is for most Americans, and for humorous effect. Boeschenstein uses this dry wit throughout the piece as comic relief, and to help the reader get a sense of her personality. Clearly, she is the type of person to appreciate any comedy to be found in her difficult situation, and the humor helps communicate that about her character, despite the piece’s use of second person.
In the end, Boeschenstein ties up her piece by talking about her dead nerve endings. In the beginning of her essay, she recounted the last night before her surgery, when she could still feel her breasts, and at the end, she came back to that idea.
“Somewhere just past your scars, your nerve endings check out. The towel is thrown in, the game is over, No. He has reached his destination. There is only one thing left to do: Sit silently. Scan the body for memories. Try to remember how it felt.”
By talking about her breasts’ physical numbness, Boeschenstein signals an emotional numbness, a tiredness, almost, to the subject of fake breasts. The decision has been made, the nerve endings are dead, and the essay is done.