“A Few Words about Fake Breasts,” by Nell Boeschenstein is a personal essay written in the second point of view. It’s about Boeschenstein’s experience and struggle with the aftermath of getting a double mastectomy to reduce the risk of breast cancer that runs in her family, and today’s societal norms. She first explains why she decides to get it done and whether or not she would change her size, or get replacement boobs at all. She later talks about how her sister didn’t even get the option of contemplating whether or not she would get the mastectomy because it was too late for her and she was younger than Boeschenstein at the time of her diagnosis.
Boeschenstein also talks about how society views plastic surgery and particularly how surgery regarding breasts is seen as something that is looked down upon. How boob jobs are for vain, fake, and insecure women, not self-loving women.
Throughout most of Boeschenstein’s essay, she talks about nerve endings, how she squeezed, “[them] as [she] said to [herself], remember how this feels. Remember how this feels.”
And she does it because she is, “hoping that feeling might somehow imprint onto memory with the same clarity as image.”
She also talked about how at the end she does not feel it anymore