“The problem with cutting your own hair is that once you start, you just keep cutting, trying to fix it, and the truth is, some things can never be fixed.

The day of my daddy’s funeral, I cut my bangs until they were the length of those little paintbrushes that come with dime-store watercolor sets. I was nine years old.

People asked me why I did it, but I was too young then to know I was changing my hair because I wanted to change my life.”

Unshelved sponsor Kim Boykin has written a novel called The Wisdom of Hair, the story of a young woman from a tiny South Carolina town who escapes an impoverished background to find her calling in beauty school – doing hair, and along the way discovers what real love is (and what it’s not) from a quirky community of lovable women.