Standing among the burnt-out cars, I actually started feeling quite nauseous. I can’t imagine anyone going to that and still denying it happened.”
Hayley Gullen was so affected by the Nova exhibition in London, commemorating the victims of the October 7 attacks in Israel, it inspired her to create a series of cartoons, which she placed on social media. “I’d seen loads of posts from other cartoonists about Gaza, but absolutely nothing about October 7 from the Jewish perspective. It felt like a real gap.”
Not that her perspective is straightforwardly Jewish. Gullen is a committed Quaker. She is also a woman who has survived breast cancer and although four years on she is cancer free, she has lasting effects such as lymphedema (swelling) in her right arm and has been pushed into premature menopause.
The experience has also transformed her perspective on life. “All the clichés about how cancer changes you and makes you think about mortality and how lucky you feel to have got through it are true – that’s why they’re clichés,” she says. “It’s helped me to empathise with a wider range of people.”
It was this search for understanding that led her to the exhibition.
“I’m not Jewish but I have good Jewish friends, and a Jewish agent, and it felt like a part of the human experience that I certainly don’t see many of my peers talking about. I wanted to understand the emotional truths of what happened that day, to go beyond headlines and statistics.”
Her new graphic memoir, This Might Surprise You, A Breast Cancer Story, could also be said to do this. She realised there was a gap in the market for a book about breast cancer that wasn’t just another manual or collection of information to process.“I wanted something to take me out of my situation. I wanted escapism.”
Her book is also darkly funny. The last thing I expected when reading it was to find myself laughing out loud, but I did – and several times. Breast cancer is, of course, no laughing matter but in Hayley’s retelling of her diagnosis and treatment, she has managed to discover the blackly humorous side of the most difficult situation, one in which Ashkenazim, due to their genetic disposition, are more likely to find themselves than the general population.
On finding herself restrained in a scanner, for example, Hayley, wonders if it’s “sexy in an alien abduction robot kind of way” and concludes: “That’s not my usual jam, but I’m open-minded.” And when she has to endure yet another biopsy, leaving still more holes in her flesh, she observes that she no longer has a breast, but a colander.
It’s touches like this that make the book so engaging, relatable and, most of all, human. Now 41, Hayley, lives in Penge, south London, with her husband (the book’s “Daniel” – all names bar her own are changed to protect people’s privacy) and seven-year-old daughter. She was just 37 when she noticed a lump in her breast during a self-check. Her gut feeling, that something wasn’t right, proved correct, and after a GP referral she was quickly diagnosed with breast cancer.
“I think when I was given the news I had a bit of disembodiment,” she recalls. “I remember seeing my own face in that moment. Obviously, I was in complete shock. When I called my family to tell them, I said, ‘I’ve got big news, guys,’ and I remembered the last time I said that was when we’d got engaged.”
The surgeon reassured her that the cancer was treatable and she wasn’t going to die, but it had a profound emotional impact on her. “I was just a normal woman living my life,” she says, “and all of a sudden, I had this identity of cancer patient. I felt the world was seeing me differently. It was dehumanising and I just felt so frustrated.”
That frustration sparked her creativity. As she began what would turn out to be 18 months of gruelling treatment – eight rounds of chemotherapy, followed by a lumpectomy, 15 sessions of radiotherapy, and 13 cycles of more chemotherapy to treat residual cancer – she began to draw. She has no formal training as an artist and, until recently, worked as a charity fundraiser. But she has always written stories – she has five so-far unpublished novels in her vault – and enjoyed doodling.
“I just had this overwhelming urge to express myself,” she says. Before her surgeon went on paternity leave, she drew him a humorous card. “That was the first cartoon I drawn in years. And he loved it, and he wrote about it in my medical notes.
“That made me realise that cartoon is actually a really good way of connecting with people. I knew that now he was seeing me in a slightly more full way because I’d given him that card. I thought, ‘Oh, there’s something I can do with this.’”
She began drawing pages relating to her experiences and teaching herself the craft of graphic storytelling. One of her inspirations was Maus, Art Spiegelman’s controversial graphic novel retelling of the Holocaust. She sought mentoring, joined Instagram and discovered an audience.
Writing about her cancer journey in a graphic novel format has allowed Hayley to communicate her experiences and reveal emotional truths more effectively than mere prose. At one point, she draws her doctor like a god, sitting on a cloud, until she asks him a question and he climbs down to her level to explain. She doesn’t shy away from anything, however gritty, whether it’s the impact of hair loss – “I looked like a Friar Tuck, with a tonsure” – to juggling work with treatment, childcare and family life, to her sex life and self-image, to unpleasant side effects.
“Even though it’s my very specific story, the simplicity of the storytelling, the sparsity of the words means readers can project themselves into the images, enter the experience themselves,” she explains.
She now wants to put cancer behind her and has become fascinated by cultural war issues – how people communicate across political and cultural divides. “I’m interested in how we talk about issues and the emotional drivers behind them. Today, especially on social media, people want to perform. It’s signalling what group they’re part of. I think it’s really harmful.
“What’s most important to me is truth – being truthful with ourselves and with other people. At the core of it all, it’s about seeing the ‘that of God’ in everyone. It’s easy to see it in your friends and the people you love. It’s harder to see it in your opponents or people you dislike, but that’s where you have to look harder. If you’re pointing at someone, saying, ‘Oh, they’re a bigot, they’ve got terrible views,’ my next question is, ‘Well, aren’t you curious why they have those views?’’’
After she posted her cartoons about the Nova exhibition she encountered some of those terrible views on her pages. “I was braced for a lot of abuse, and I got some. But the overall response was much more positive than I’d anticipated. I got so many lovely pages saying ‘Thank you.’”
This Might Surprise You: A Breast Cancer Story by Hayley Gullen is out now, published by Bloomsbury Green Tree
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