In this collection of essays, women talk about their hair-- and in doing so, offer up reflections and revelations about family, race, religion, ritual, culture, motherhood, politics, and celebrity. Layered into these essays you'll find surprises, insights, hilarity, and the resonance of common experience. Many things in life matter more than hair, but few bring as much pleasure as a really great hairdo.

"Romantic-comedy-obsessed Annie Cassidy dreams of being the next Nora Ephron. She spends her days writing internet content, rewatching Sleepless in Seattle, and waiting for her movie-perfect meet cute. If she could just find her own Tom Hanks-- a man who's sweet, sensitive, and possibly owns a houseboat-- her problems would disappear and her life would be perfect. But Tom Hanks is nowhere in sight. When a movie starts filming in her neighborhood and...

An intimate, bracing, and beautiful exploration of vulnerability and culpability. Zoffness relives her childhood anxiety disorder as she witnesses it manifest in her firstborn; endures brazen sexual advances by a student in her class; grapples with the implications of her young son's cop obsession; and challenges her Jewish faith. What role does a mother play, she asks, in raising thoughtful, generous children? Where is the line between privacy and...

"In 1963 Sylvia Plath took her own life in her London flat. Her death was the culmination of a brief, brilliant life lived in the shadow of clinical depression-- a condition exacerbated by her tempestuous relationship with mercurial poet Ted Hughes. The ensuing years saw Plath rise to martyr status while Hughes was cast as the cause of her suicide, his infidelity at the heart of her demise. For decades, Hughes never bore witness to the truth of their...

"Benjamin Moser's Sontag, a biography of Susan Sontag, is a portrait of the iconoclastic and prolific essayist, novelist, and critic and her role in the history of American intellectualism" --

"Elissa and Rita have forever struggled to find their place in each other's worlds. Rita, an overreaching, makeup-addicted, narcissistic Manhattan singer couldn't be more different from Elissa, her gay, taciturn New England writer daughter. Stuck in an outrageous maelstrom of codependency, mother and daughter cannot seem to extricate themselves from the center of each other's lives. Motherland is their universal story: a kaleidoscopic journey built...

The author argues that Louisa's "Marmee," Abigail May Alcott, was in fact the intellectual and emotional center of her daughter's world--exploding the myth that her outspoken idealist father was the source of her progressive thinking and remarkable independence.

"Bird Cloud" is the name the author gave to 640 acres of Wyoming wetlands and prairie and four hundred foot cliffs plunging down to the North Platte River. On the day she first visited, a cloud in the shape of a bird hung in the evening sky. She also saw pelicans, bald eagles, golden eagles, great blue herons, ravens, scores of bluebirds, harriers, kestrels, elk, deer and a dozen antelope. She fell in love with the land, then owned by the Nature Conservancy,...

In Dreaming of lions, the author shares stories from her life, from South West Africa (now Namibia) in the 1950s to the Kalahari Desert, where she conducted fieldwork among the Ju/wa Bushmen. Her skills as an observer and a writer put to the test on these and many occasions working with dogs, cats, cougars, deer, and with personal struggles, she has become the author of many books full of insightful observations.