# ‘I cried about my breast cancer – but I didn’t throw a pity party’: Anastacia on hardship, hits and humour

#### Paula Cocozza
25 Mar 2025 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Tue 11 Mar 2025 11.15 EDT

**A**fter Anastacia had a double mastectomy in 2013, she began to joke about it. “It was wild to look at myself. I said: ‘My boobs look like this!’” She peers at me with her eyes screwed shut. We are sharing a sofa in a photographic studio in London. I’m not sure what she means, but she belts out, “No eyeballs!” (Typically, nipples come towards the end of reconstructive surgery.) Even in hospital, “I would make jokes and be funny,” she says. “I’m lucky.” Lucky isn’t how many people would feel after getting breast cancer for the second time, but preventive surgery was her choice and, she says, “I can accept it when I find humour in it. Being able to take the mick out of myself and my _toxic titties!_ – See! There you go! – it takes the sting out of it.”

Anastacia has always been like this, she says. Back when she used to break her older sister Shawn’s dolls, “cos the arms didn’t go in a certain direction”, her mum tried to punish her. She gave  brand new dolls, and Anastacia the broken ones. But Anastacia was in her element. “I played hospital. I was like ‘Whee! Whee!’” she says, bouncing her hands, busily working imaginary dolls. She made them have a great time despite their mutilations, scribbled-on faces and brutally cut hair. “Which is constantly how my life is. I was born with that in me, and it amplified as I got older and realised: ‘Oh yeah, that’s a better way to live than worrying about things.’”

By her own admission, Anastacia can come across as “a little much”. Apparently, there’s an “isolator” in her: an introvert who shuts the door and decompresses so the extrovert – who has shown up today – can go out to “do my job, sing what I need to sing”. Her voice and vocal range are huge just when she’s talking; she seems always about to burst into laughter or song. Even her yawns are musical, her chatter peppered with klaxons, trumpets and squealing brakes. Her energy and playfulness make it easy to picture her as a sort of doll in her own hands – she has certainly seen her share of hospitals – bouncing about, trying to find joy in the hard things and come up with the story that makes sense of all the breakages.

At 56, Anastacia has flown into London before a  to mark the 25th anniversary of her debut album, Not That Kind. Here she will play the megastar that she is in Europe. Back home in the US, she has never toured. Albums that have gone platinum in the UK, Germany or Australia have barely charted there. I’m wondering how she explains this division to herself. “I’m OK,” she says. “Because if I’d had success in the US, I might have been a different person.” As it is, she is happy to say, “I am a continual working girl in her job.”

“Working girl” sounds very humble for someone who has sold more than 30m records, but it wasn’t a “fancy life”, growing up. Pinging between her home town of Chicago, New York (where her father lived and the family later moved) and her grandpa in Florida was Anastacia’s “version of understanding the world”. In career terms, she was a late bloomer. She entered the talent show The Cut in 1998, pretending to be 24 when she was actually 30. When she signed with Sony soon after, “I told everybody ,” she says, leaning forward and speaking with exaggerated secrecy out of one side of her mouth, “_I’m just letting you know!_ They were like: ‘It doesn’t matter. You can pass! Your talent is beyond!'”

But lying about her age was “real hard”. Partly because she was raised to be honest, and partly because it was impossible to keep up with the maths. She eventually came clean – with huge relief – when she turned 40.

You would think that starting later would make her more worldly, but Anastacia says: “Even though I was much older than everyone thought, I had a very innocent, naive approach to the industry.” She had never travelled overseas or worn designer clothes before. While filming the video for her debut single, , she went to fetch money because “I had _no idea_ it would be free. I was like: ‘This is nuts!’” At the time, she points out, “I was an out-of-work receptionist collecting an unemployment cheque.” Her early riders sound like a pocket money blowout in the corner shop: “Doritos, candy, chocolate, Diet Coke.”

The truth is, she says, “I never really understood what I had as a singer until much later in life. I didn’t sound like anyone, so I didn’t think \ the right voice. I didn’t sound like Celine \ or Madonna. I sounded more like Aretha \ and Tina Turner. It doesn’t work well coming out of …” she gestures to herself. “Even though I was a white girl, I had this soul in me and I don’t know where that came from.”



As I’m thinking no lemon is too sour for her to wring lemonade from it, she says she “got a kick” out of her menopausal hot flushes. “I would just be talking – then, phew! Let me take off my jacket!” She starts to fan herself vigorously and look around shouting, impersonating herself in a restaurant, “I was like: ‘Yo dude! I’m on _FIRE_! Wheew!’” she says, her tongue hanging out. “I didn’t find it embarrassing. I thought, that’s hilarious … I was shocked that my body could do that. It was fascinating.”

Now she is “100% full menopause” and proud. “ is talking about it, the Oprahs of this world … we’re all going: ‘Oh my God, we’re in fucking menopause!’ We’re talking about it to take away the cloud. It’s not a terrible thing.” Recently, though, she admitted to having mistaken menopausal migraines for a brain tumour. In her own words, there is always “a health crisis one step away”. She has previously suffered from an abnormal heart rhythm, and was diagnosed with Crohn’s disease at 13. Does she fear illness?

“I’ve _never_ feared for my life,” she says. “And I’ve never lost faith. That’s just who I am.” But faith in what? “Faith as in belief. If you believe in yourself you’re just like: ‘Hmm, well. Got cancer. That sucks.’ Yes, I cried about it. Yes, I said: ‘God, I didn’t think I was going to die this way.’ But I didn’t wallow. I didn’t throw a pity party for myself.”



Two years ago, she moved to Denver, Colorado, because she had been thinking of “retirement reality”. The reasoning was: “If I’m in Beverly Hills, paying a gazillion dollars to have a 90210 address, what about going somewhere you can actually save some money?” She is not currently writing an album but there is talk of a single, and a possible tour extension, so what does she mean “retirement”? “Meaning, this is where we want to live, where we want to grow old,” she says.

The “we”, incidentally, is “my mum, my brother, my sister and I. It’s always them,” she says. Brian, her brother, is disabled and needs care. Shawn is Anastacia’s assistant. “My as-__sister__\-ant!” she hoots. Even her fans are family. “I’ve seen them get married … I’ve seen their children.” She and Shawn find it hilarious when the ones in front who used to “jump and scream” all night now sit down after half a verse.

So the “we” doesn’t include a partner? “I sometimes include a relationship with that, and sometimes don’t,” she replies. After divorcing her husband (and former bodyguard) of three years in 2010, she stopped discussing her personal life. However, she is wearing a pendant with the number 090622 in script. That is clearly a special anniversary. “Oh, my God!” she howls. “It’s my dog’s birthday! Broady! Broady-on-the-roadie!”

Shawn is bringing the chocolate yorkshire terrier to Spain. “He’ll be on the whole tour. I told my manager, I’ve lived without these things for so long. I know it’s harder. Harder on hotels, flights. But I really do _want that_ in my life. I know it’s very diva, but I’m not a mom, I don’t have a kid, I’m not married. So there’s not much that I do besides work. I’d like to feel fulfilled when I get home and see the dog and I’m like …” She puckers her lips. “Mwah, mwah, mwah!”

I feel sorry for her when she says she doesn’t have much beyond work. Especially when she reflects that with Donald Trump in power, “we’re all in the Upside Down now”. What does she want from life? “I’m getting it,” she says, sounding indignant. “I’m totally getting it. I’m living it _right now_. I’m _in_ it.”

_Not That Kind 25th anniversary vinyl reissue is out on 11 April. Anastacia’s European tour begins 12 March in Barcelona_

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