My Hair Removal Guide:

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Do You ever get the feeling that your life is scripted in some way, that events conspire to thrust one subject at you over and over again? All my life, it's been my hair. I've always been judged by it, as though its unruliness said something about the human being lurking under its mass.

When I was a girl, Jean Seberg's bowl cut as Joan of Arc made a huge impression on me. I stuck a bowl on my head, trimmed round it, then Brylcreem-ed what was left into submission. Still the curls defied reason.

In later life, I learned that the only time I felt truly anonymous was when my hair was tucked away under a hat. So it's appropriate that the first letter I got from a reader wanted my opinion on our cultural obsession with hair removal, especially now that it seems like there are almost as many men as women who are plucking, waxing and shaving. Then I happened on a syndrome that was new to me: trichotillomania, or compulsive hair-pulling. It afflicts an estimated two to eight million people in the US alone, 90 per cent of them female. The primary symptom is a constant neurotic tugging at hair on any part of the body. I noticed my granddaughter Maiya at it and began to worry that she was a trichotillomaniac in the making. Then my worry worried me. Am I turning into a manic granny? I was too damn busy to worry about my daughters the way I fret about Maiya.

Perhaps that's the penalty attached to reflection in a life that hasn't had much time for it until now.