HEADSTRONG

An insightful, posthumously published memoir about alopecia and personal fulfillment.

Bailey, who died in 2015, wrote in this remembrance that she was in the midst of a stressful and financially devastating divorce in the early 1990s when her hair started to fall out—and it wasn’t the first time. Ever since she was 4, she’d had recurring bouts of patchy hair loss; when she was in high school in the ’80s, she was diagnosed with alopecia areata—an autoimmune condition that causes the body to attack its own hair follicles. Her hair grew back after treatment, but by 1994, half of her hair was gone, and previously successful remedies weren’t working. She bought a $3,500 wig that looked so natural that no one, aside from close family members, knew of her hair loss. After earning an MBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and moving first to Louisville, Kentucky, then to Denver for a series of corporate jobs, she found good friends while running races and competing in triathlons. Alopecia remained her secret; the first person she told outside her family was a friend in Colorado who was facing hair loss from chemotherapy. Unfulfilled in work, she joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Amapala, Honduras, leaving the wig behind and becoming “Pañuelo [Headscarf] Girl.” She still had negative feelings about what she saw as her “lumpy, hundred-and-sixty-eight-pound, size-twelve body,” and realized that becoming Pañuelo Girl was “about giving up the fear that surrounds being who I am.”  Bailey described the everyday difficulties of living with alopecia, from the daily bombardment of advertisements featuring women with luxuriant hair to the discriminatory actions of an airline ticket agent, in relatable detail. She also wrote about her relationships with her ex-husband, parents, sister, and friends perceptively and openly. The story of Bailey’s Peace Corps experience, in particular, is an eye-opening read; the dismissive attitude of the mayor and municipal office at her first site is disheartening, but it makes her story of her successful organization of the Isla del Tigre Triatlón even more inspiring.

A triumphant story of a long journey of self-acceptance.