A BOOB'S LIFE

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.