Jennifer Hayden's The Story of My Tits (Top Shelf), released in October with a starred review from PW, is more than a memoir of her illness, it's the story of her life. Her breasts provide a structure for the story, from her childhood, when she stuffed rocks into her bikini to fill it out, through late-blooming adolescence, dealing with her mother's breast cancer and the family issues that brought to the fore, her own love story, motherhood, and finally, saying goodbye to her breasts with a double mastectomy due to breast cancer.

Like Roz Chast's graphic memoir, Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant, Hayden's book uses the medium of comics to tell a very personal story that speaks to readers far beyond the traditional audience for graphic novels.

Why did you decide to tell your story as a graphic novel?

I wanted something that would take my voice and transmit it to the reader as easily as if I was having a beer with them at the kitchen table. I wanted that informality and immediacy. I didn’t want to be a formal speaker. I didn’t want my words to get in the way. I wanted it to be colloquial.

Your experience with breast cancer is the climax of the story. Why is that?

I could have done this book as "I'm recovering from my mastectomy and this makes me think of so many things,” but I thought that would be so dull—if you already know what has happened it wouldn’t be so exciting. In deciding not to do it that way, I had to lay out everything important to the reader before I got my diagnosis, so they could go through what I went through, and they could literally be me.

This book has a lot of humor for a story about cancer.

I have to say it wouldn't have been so funny if I had died. A lot of things are funny when you survive them. But my husband and I both have kind of gallows humor. Humor had to be part of this book because it was such an underlying part of this story. That's the healing, when you start to laugh. That moment [just before the mastectomy] when they are injecting dye to find my lymph nodes, and they take the needle out and carefully put a Band-Aid on it, and even at that time, when I didn't know I was going to be OK, I looked at my husband and said "Thank God they are taking good care of this breast they are going to lop off."

Did you think about the fact that this might be your readers' first graphic novel?

It was my first graphic novel. As it was my first graphic novel, I was not speaking to aficionados. I was a beginner. I was in discovery mode, and I wasn't going to be doing any sophisticated quotes or homages to anything I was reading. I was just trying not to fall off the back of the truck. I thought my readers might be like me, might not have discovered graphic novels till mid-life, and I thought, "Be real clear. Do not lose them!"

Breast cancer narratives have become increasingly prominent in recent years. How is your book part of that new conversation?

My cancer was 11 years ago. People weren't talking about breast cancer then with as much lightness as they do now. I set out to tell a survivor's story that would be the story of a woman, and the last chapter is cancer, not a cancer story per se. The question is now how do we go on living with our bodies after surgery or the feeling the other shoe is going to fall. You might have an incredibly long life. My mother had a mastectomy at 58. She is now 89, and she's fine. Who are we?