A Boob's Life: How America's Obsession Shaped Me-and You

by Leslie Lehr

Overview

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.

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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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781643136226
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	03/02/2021
Pages:	312
Sales rank:	339,009
Product dimensions:	8.90(w) x 6.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Leslie Lehr is a prize-winning author, screenwriter, essayist, and story consultant. She is the author of 66 Laps, Wife Goes On, and What a Mother Knows, and her essays have been published in the New York Times Modern Love column and Huffington Post. She is a member of PEN, the Authors Guild, WGA, Women In Film, and the Women’s Leadership Council. She lives in Southern California.

Table of Contents

1 Obsession, 2015 1

Why America Is Obsessed With Breasts

Part I Breast Envy Girlhood

2 Daddy's Girl, 1965 11

Bra Basics

3 Live Nude Women, 1966 21

American Women in Playboy

4 History According to Breasts, 1967-1970 37

Beauty Pageants

5 Smart vs. Pretty, 1972 65

Cheerleaders: Sis Boom Breasts!

6 California Girls, 1978 85

Bare Breasts in American Film

Part II The Booby Trap Adulthood

7 From MS. to Mom, 1983 103

Breastfeeding Basics

8 Birthday Babe, 1997 129

Better Boob Jokes

9 Divorce: The "A" Word, 2004 141

Emotional Abuse

10 Boob Job, 2005 157

Breast Augmentation by the Numbers

11 Peek-A-Boob: Dating, 2006 169

Breast Censorship

12 Dressing for Sex, 2008 183

Secrets of Victoria's Secret

Part III The Breast of Everything Womanhood

13 Killer Boobs, 2012 205

US Breast Cancer Statistics

14 Chemo Chick, 2013 221

A Few Americans Diagnosed with Breast Cancer

15 How Not to Be a Role Model, 2013 253

Breast Myths and Facts

16 Picasso Boobs, 2014. 273

A Few Nicknames for Breasts

17 The Death of Daddy's Girl, 2016 287

Women's Legal Rights

18 Boobs "R" Us, 2017 305

First Females

19 The Fourth Wave 323

Acknowledgments 337

Endnotes 339

Editorial Reviews

12/14/2020

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. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Brave, honest, and funny, this book will open your eyes, break your heart, and make you reflect on your own life and history."

Brenda Janowitz

"A powerful emotinoal chronicle of a young girl's budding awareness of the power of breasts; a young woman's negotiations as an object of male desire; a mother's loving perspective on her children's food source, and an adult woman's struggle with a disease that could take her life. An insightful, comprehensive, modern-day manifesto that champions a woman's totality."

Hope Edelman

"Deeply personal, wisely funny, and moving. This isn't just a fantastic, intimate memoir about how cancer, survival, and life in general changed Lehr's entire relationship with her body parts, but an exploration of how our breast-obsessed culture, women's lib, and men, have shaped our feelings about breasts. Insightful, delightful, and eye-opening."

Caroline Leavitt

"Lehr combines stores from her own life with cultural analysis to illuminate our society's fixation on the feminine form, breasts in particular, and how that focus shapes us all."

People Magazine

"You might as well get to know the sacks of fat and tissue that form the major locus of human life, and there's no better tour guide than Leslie Lehr, a witty writer and breast cancer survivor, who holds nothing back. This is part memoir, part manifesto, part history."

Glamour Magazine

"Poignant, powerful, and ultimately hopeful—who would think a breast could properly capture the history of women in our country? A Boob's Life makes you realize women in America have been through a lot. That you have been through a lot. Equality must be the next wave. It can't come soon enough."

Kaira Rouda

"Told with heart, humor, hope, and a whole lot of sassiness. Lehr fearlessly and candidly brings us along on her breast cancer journey and beyond. Have a box of tissues at the ready as you read this deeply personal memoir. You'll need them to wipe away tears of heartache and laughter."

Heather Gudenkauf

"As women we are always asking ourselves, are we enough? Leslie Lehr's witty, wise, and sometimes heartbreaking memoir, A Boob's Life, uses our relationship with breasts, and the ways others define us through them, to explore what it means to live in a woman's body. Original, thought-provoking, and with an elegant sense of humor, A Boob's Life is a must-read."

Salma Hayek

"When I was a little girl dreaming of having breasts, I had no idea about the non-stop ogling and boob worship I was in for as a woman in America. Leslie Lehr explains it all in this funny, passionate, upbeat book. You’ll never look at yourself in the mirror the same way again. Wow!

Leslie Morgan Steiner

Represents the dark side of fidelity and family life. The book is suspenseful, the prose spare. Dip into 66 Laps and you may well feel compelled to race to the finish.

USA Today [praise for Leslie Lehr]

Dark and unsettling, but with a ray of hope like a splash of light, and a knockout ending you won’t see coming.

New York Times bestselling author of With or Witho Caroline Leavitt

Dark and unsettling, but with a ray of hope like a splash of light, and a knockout ending you won’t see coming.

New York Times bestselling author of "Pictures of Caroline Leavitt

Lehr has crafted an insightful novel that gets at the heart of what it means to be a wife, a mother, a woman, in a world overrun by the expectations of pop culture.

New York Times bestselling author of "Think" [prai Lisa Bloom

02/01/2021

In this quirky book, Lehr encourages readers to think about the social construction of the breast along with the reality of how beauty standards and the facts and fictions of desirability have played a role in her own changing cup size—and in the lives of many others. She talks about beauty queens, cheerleaders, and the myriad narratives around female embodiment before turning to her own story as a mother, a single woman, a cancer survivor, and more, in stories that seamlessly blend social critique, humor, and pain. This social history spans the 20th century, from the golden age of the pinup girl during World War II to the onset of TV advertising in the 1950s and the launch of Playboy magazine in 1953. Lehr also includes a history of the bra, from its origins as a handkerchief to replace a corset in 1910 to the push-up bra in the 1940s to bras as high fashion in the 21st century. For Lehr, laughter and shame are irrevocably intertwined when talking about breasts or bras, especially her stories of breastfeeding and, later, undergoing chemotherapy after a diagnosis of breast cancer. VERDICT A unique blend of memoir and social history that should have broad appeal to anyone who has breasts or has ever worn a bra.—Emily Bowles, Lawrence Univ., WI

Library Journal

2020-12-09
A screenwriter and essayist argues that how Americans view breasts has defined life for generations of women.

Lehr’s book contains just about everything you would want to know about breasts. Pardon the pun, but it’s not about titillation—though plenty of insight can be gleaned from her cultural history. The book is about fixation and awareness, the many ways in which life shuffles women a raw deal, and why we continue to fail to rectify the inequities. The author also examines marriage, motherhood, the writing life, and conflicting emotions. “As far back as I can remember,” writes Lehr, “everywhere I’ve lived, breasts have been the Holy Grail, the quest for female perfection. I’m beginning to think breasts are more than a body part. They might be the whole game.” That game, she demonstrates, has often held women back. Lehr is a smooth, eminently likable guide, and she elicits no small measure of sympathy for the trials she has endured, including her bout with breast cancer. She is thoughtful and honest about the push-pull of acculturation and candid about her own complicity in how societal attitudes often narrow women’s status. Occasionally, the author engages in doctrinaire language and sweeping generalizations. Justified though she may be in her anger about certain cultural norms, the outrage sometimes gets overheated, undermining valid arguments with exaggeration. While many of the statistics buttress Lehr’s views, numbers don’t tell the whole story. She is at her liveliest and most convincing when she tempers rhetoric with personal anecdotes. The text also includes a variety of sidebars including “Bra Basics,” a timeline of American beauty pageants (1998: “Forty of the fifty-one Miss USA contestants have breast implants”), and a list of American women who have appeared in Playboy, divided by decade.

A serious and provocative book with enough lightness to keep the pages turning.

Kirkus Reviews