3.5 stars. ( )

What I kept thinking of as a flaw in this book--the lack of author photos--turned out to be one of the things that made it great, because each time I started reading a new essay I just had to google its author. Although there is a contributors list at the end with brief bios, it was impossible to read a bunch of essays about women and their hair without wanting to know what each woman (and her hair) looked like. Inevitably, I read a bit about each of them too, and thus got to know a whole slew of authors who were new to me, and got re-acquainted with others (Jane Smiley, Anne Lamott, Deborah Tannen) on a different footing from any previous contacts I'd had with them. The collection also got me thinking about my own history with and feelings about my hair, and it turns out that hair is a pretty meaty subject!

There's a great interview with editor Elizabeth Benedict here: http://nytlive.nytimes.com/womenintheworld/2015/10/04/a-new-book-uncovers-the-co.... I don't want to confirm the fear she mentions in the last question by talking superficially about her hair, but as a person who liberated myself from hair dye a couple of years back myself, I was delighted, when doing the above mentioned googling, to find that she had decided to go gray after writing her essay about not going gray for the collection. Just like Joan Baez, she looks fantastic gray.

Finally, I loved this book because my fabulous-haired best friend gave it to me, and had it signed for me by Ms. Benedict. What better present could a girl ask for? ( )

I had no idea there was so much to say about hair. Wow! This was an eye-opener for me, since I'm that someone who just washes and goes. As I was reading these various women's stories, I thought about my past hairdos and remembered many stories that I have myself. I remember going from long hair to super short abruptly, the one time my grandma bleached my hair and how much I hated it until she put a golden blonde rinse on it, my perm in the 80's when I was going to be a high school freshman and had to swim in PE, and of course the hours I spent before school each morning curling and feathering my hair. I'm sure there are many more stories, but now I'm pretty low maintenance. Anyway, this was a fun book to read and I found myself resonating with a few ladies more than others.
Thank you LibraryThing for this advanced copy and the opportunity to read and review this book. ( )

I enjoyed this book, much as I thought I would, but one creeping thing started to bother me about 1/3 of the way through and it just ruined the whole experience - nearly every one of the contributors lives in New York. It just gives a very exclusive feel to a book I thought was supposed to be inclusive - all the various experiences women have with their hair.

There are some good pieces here, Deborah Tannen's is particularly excellent and Marita Golden, Ru Freeman, and Adriana Trigiani also impressed. But the vast majority of these essays are the reminiscences of middle class white women of a certain age (often Jewish), and as a result there is a repetitiveness that makes this a bit of a slog. I am a middle class Jewish white woman of a certain age. My mother told me how ugly my hair was pretty much daily until the day she died. Through my teen years (until I put my foot down in 11th grade) she took me to a straightening place in a particularly rough Detroit neighborhood to try to make it less horrible. After straightening it really was ugly. As an adult I have come to kind of love my hair, and like many of the authors in this anthology, that evolution dovetails with a broader acceptance of self. Certainly there were many points on which I connected to the pieces, but that still doesn't make the 5th story about how someone had their mother iron their hair on an ironing board more appealing. If I was not reading this for the Book Riot challenge I imagine I would have abandoned ship. 300 pages on feelings about hair is just more than I can take. YMMV ( )