Audrey's Guide to Wigging Out

  This book starts with a rejection.

Several rejections, actually. And the first one—like many first rejections—was unexpected and painful and, eventually, very funny. It happened to my scalp, which was rejected by my hair very suddenly one week when I was nineteen years old. 

I’d spent most of my young life taking my tresses for granted. It seemed reasonable to assume that anything growing on my body, historically speaking, would continue to do so. But my freshman year of college, I found myself in a student health center, on hold with an overbooked dermatologist, wondering if I might be dying while a nurse whispered, “You’ve got to cry, honey. They’ll take you more seriously if you cry.”

Being taken seriously for a medical condition is, of course, something that happens automatically for the average woman.

I tried to type that with a straight face, I really did.

That wasn’t the first time my hair rejected my head. At nineteen, it started a slow and steady pattern of departure, a little like an on-again, off-again boyfriend. I’d find my hair draped across pillows, lounging around on the couch, sidling across café tables as if looking for better prospects. I tried everything to entice it—new hairstyles, fancy oils, massages, light treatments. I even got tattoos. Thousands of little dots, so my follicles could have role models. 

Nothing worked. By the time I was forty, every photograph revealed the increasing height of my forehead. Every stray breeze lifted my wisps to reveal, even more clearly, the scalp underneath. I was afraid to stand in front of people, or they’d see the back of my head. I snuck to the back of every room. I retreated even more than my hair. And I didn’t know how to find my way back.

I resisted an obvious option—wigs—for a long time. No matter how little of my hair was left, or how miserable it made me, I still had it.

Kinda. And I didn’t think wigs were made for someone like me. I associated them with people whose hair had broken up with them for good, and completely. I thought that wearing a wig would mean—just a little—that I was giving up. Not just on my hair, but on being a person who had hair, for better or for worse. No matter how unattractive or judged I felt. And I thought of wigs as a worse option than that one, because they were complicated and expensive, hard to find, difficult to maintain, and uncomfortable. 

Nothing could have been further from the truth. They were none of those things, and the information I’d always heard to the contrary—which was all the information I’d heard—was simply wrong. When I discovered wigs and learned how to wear them, my world was filled with possibility again. I say “discovered,” which makes it sound like I’d just stumbled across something everyone knows about. 

But the truth is that learning about wigs—how to wear them, where to find them, how to afford them, what kinds there are, who knows about them—is like a college-level course with no curriculum or textbook. 

Worse, it’s on a subject that no one wants to talk about. It’s also a subject that you’re pretty convinced, at the beginning, that you’re totally doomed to flunk.

I am a girl who needs a book, and there wasn’t one.

Until now.

MORE SOON!

In the meantime, Audrey is posting Guide to Wigging Out videos on Instagram: instagram.com/audreyburges

Or on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCuGSl29oWjXiKj52_jUob3g