Wore Lipstick to My Mastectomy

¶ … Wore Lipstick to my Mastectomy by Geralyn Lucas

A Writer's Personal Battle with Cancer

In her book, Why I Wore Lipstick to my Mastectomy, Geralyn Lucas details her personal battle with breast cancer. Geralyn Lucas was a 27-year-old newlywed, married to a doctor named Tyler, with a successful career in television, when she discovered that she had three lumps during a routine breast self-exam. Different doctors suggest different solutions, ranging from a lumpectomy up to a dramatic double-mastectomy. Like many other women confronted with cancer, Lucas finds herself concerned with details that may seem insignificant to people not suffering from the disease. For example, one of her first concerns is whether she will have to have chemotherapy, and, if she does, whether her hair will fall out as a result of the treatment. She then has to confront the idea that she may have to have her breast removed in order to survive her breast cancer diagnosis.

At first blush, the choice seems clear; lose a breast or lose a life. Obviously, it seems that any rational person would choose to lose a breast. However, Lucas' book tackles one of the realities of being a woman in America, which is that beauty is a powerful and important part of femininity. Moreover, breasts, one of the physical features that really distinguish men from women, are an important part of a woman's femininity, even her identity. This reality comes as a struggle for Lucas. In fact, one chapter of the book focuses Lucas detailing her visit to a strip club, where she hopes that she can come to understand the power of breasts. Her stated goal is to come to terms with the idea that she needs to have a mastectomy. However, she seems to have a secondary goal of trying to understand the power that breasts have in society.

Lucas eventually comes to the decision to have a mastectomy, though the decision is not easy. Her husband, a doctor who initially dismissed her concerns about her lump as mere hypochondria, reacts to the news of her illness like a husband, rather than a doctor. He worries that their marriage will break up, because, as a practicing doctor, he has seen cancer destroy other marriages. Her parents and siblings react with panic and hysteria; her younger brother even offers to quit school and take care of her during her treatment. However, she reveals that she actually has an enviable support network, which helps her through her diagnosis, treatment, and recovery.

The book, however, is not only about breast cancer; it is also about lipstick. Lipstick may seem like a frivolous topic, and, at least on the surface, it is. However, she talks about the power of lipstick. Of course, the lipstick itself is not powerful. Instead, it is what the lipstick symbolizes. Lucas describes her own journey from lip-gloss to lipstick. She began with Bonne Belle lip glosses; colorless glosses that drew little attention to her lips. Of course, the reader understands that her lips are a stand-in for her female sexuality. Then, she describes moving to lipstick in high school, and though she cannot pinpoint an exact moment, her eventual transition to matte red lipstick as an adult. When the time comes, Lucas does not plan to wear lipstick to her mastectomy; she happens to recall having a tube of her trademark lipstick in the pocket of her jeans before the surgery. She puts the lipstick on as a sign of her power, but, when she briefly considers fleeing her pre-surgery suite, it is the image of her running down in the street in a backless hospital gown and surgical cap with bright red lips that convinces her of the insanity of such an act.

Remarkably, for a book about a person's struggle with cancer, Lucas' book was tremendously uplifting. This is not to suggest that Lucas glossed over the realistically negative aspects of cancer, because she did not. She talked about how pre-diagnosis many cancer patients are treated like hypochondriacs, how different doctors can give dramatically different opinions, making it more difficult for a patient to decide upon a course of treatment, the non-health considerations that go into deciding treatment, and the impact that a cancer diagnosis can have on even a healthy and loving family. However, it would be erroneous to suggest that Lucas focuses on the negative. Instead, her cancer diagnosis provided a catalyst for her to investigate the relationship between beauty, sexuality, and feminine power in America. The resulting discussion, and Lucas' affirmation that all women should be able to wear red lipstick, is extremely uplifting.

One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Lucas uses Marilyn Monroe, probably the preeminent example of American female sexuality, as an example throughout the book. Monroe is one of those rare sex symbols who is not frequently broken down into parts, but is taken as the whole as an eminently sexual creature. Furthermore, years after her death, most people are aware that the sex-pot side of Marilyn Monroe was an affectation that a young girl used to achieve commercial and financial success in Hollywood. Lucas breaks Monroe down into two aspects; the breasts and the lipstick. Looking at a pre-surgical society, she shows how women could have been born with or without breasts like Monroe's, but they could always choose to wear her lipstick. Monroe's own choice was to wear the lipstick. The use of Monroe as an example strikes a chord with the reader, because her sexuality and power were so completely intertwined, in that public persona. It is interesting to see how Lucas claims her power through a sexual means, even though her tremendous educational, professional, and personal successes would argue against her use of sexuality as a means of achieving power, if one were to view Lucas' life from the viewpoint of traditional feminist gender equity theories. Though she does not spend a significant amount of time discussing feminist theories, Lucas makes it clear in her book that she thinks that sexuality, especially a woman's image of her own sexuality, plays an important role in feminine power.

As a result, the reader is left with the impression that Lucas' book may be able to provide answers to the gaps that are missing in feminist theories. Though most modern women have undoubtedly benefitted from the feminist movement, many of them are reluctant to self-identify as feminists, because there seems to be a misconception that feminists cannot use their sexuality as a source of power. Lucas turns this theory on its head, by showing that a woman can use her sexuality as a source of her own power. She puts on red lipstick, not to impress her surgeon or the scrub nurses, but because it gave her a feeling of power, which she needed to face a scary surgery. For female readers, that idea is very compelling, because most modern women want to feel feminine, sexy, and powerful, without feeling as if they are somehow betraying themselves or betraying other women, by harnessing their sexuality as a source of power.