Christy has a secret. While even her closest friends see the confident young professional rocking a blond '90s perm, she privately battles an ever-growing patchwork of bald spots, enlisting stinging creams, painful injections, and clever camouflage, from comb-overs to berets. Then, after her brief marriage collapses, her eyebrows vanish, too.

At first, Christy manages her alopecia areata with wigs, creating a masterful façade of a woman with striking auburn tresses. She even runs marathons in a baseball cap adorned with sweaty strips of fake hair. When 26 miles isn't enough distance from her secret, she quits her corporate job and joins the Peace Corps, embarking on a bold, sexy, and intentional journey of radical self-acceptance.

On a remote Honduran island, Christy embraces a new image, her bare scalp wrapped in the colorful headscarves—pañuelos—that earn her the nickname "Pañuelo Girl." But she can't run forever. Who will she be when she returns home to a society obsessed with beautiful hair?

***

EDITORIAL REVIEWS

Christy, in her riveting and urgent memoir, emotionally and metaphorically unwraps the scarf from her head, seemingly layer by layer, as she brings us deep inside the experience of alopecia, a hair-loss disease first noticed by her mother when Christy was a child. But, at its core, it's also an exploration about self-definition, identity, and self-image. What does the hair loss mean, metaphorically? How does Christy come to terms with it? Ultimately, through her writing, Christy arrives at her deepest and most revelatory emotional truths.

—Sue William Silverman, author, Acetylene Torch Songs: Writing True Stories to Ignite the Soul

This is a memoir for the soul—one woman's journey to find her true self inside her mirror. Battling self-doubt, a bad marriage, cultural expectations, and a body rejecting hair growth, Christy Bailey travels from North Carolina to Central America to Colorado in search of purpose and belonging, only to discover that her destination resides within. Headstrong redefines notions of femininity, strength, and liberation by showing us what it really means to be bald and beautiful. Christy's voice resonates with sass, grit, wisdom, and light. It will sing for decades to come.

—Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, author of Finding Querencia: Essays from In Between

This is a story about a woman who spends much of her life trying to conform to conventional beauty standards, only to discover she is far too extraordinary to ever be just another pretty face. Christy Bailey is a stunning woman and an insightful writer. Her Headstrong is an inspiration for us all.

—Tiffany Quay Tyson, award-winning author of The Past is Never and Three Rivers

Headstrong is a tapestry of serious beauty: in the face of major life losses, including the loss of all her hair due to alopecia, Christy weaves rich childhood memories, smart cultural commentary, and a striking resiliency that grows from her vulnerability and the self-exposing progression of her disease. Her book is a testament to the force that Christy was to all who knew her, and a lasting legacy of her unique suffering and the hopeful courage it imparted to her life.

—Megan Nix, author of Remedies for Sorrow

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