You  might not think those two topics have anything to do with each other: haircuts and writing fiction.

I wouldn’t have either, until yesterday.

Yesterday was the day I suddenly couldn’t stand my hair another second. You know what this is like. It was either go to the hair salon or get the pinking shears out of the sewing box and have at it myself. The night before, my hair had been subpar but acceptable, and then Tuesday morning, it was unbearable. Go figure.

Luckily I see a haircut person who is not only wonderful, but she works a million hours and seems always to be able to get a person in if she hears that pinking shears might become involved. So I called up, got an appointment for 2 o’clock, and then spent the morning writing my novel.

By the time the appointment came around, I was lost in the book, totally immersed in the story–but, hello, this is a haircut we’re talking about. You have to go to a haircut! So I went.

“What are you working on lately?” asked the hairdresser, whom I will refer to as R, for her own protection. She took me over to the sink to be shampooed.

So I told her about my book. (I have to stop here and say that I knew this was very, very bad to do. Writers are not supposed to discuss the plots of their books with anyone, not even kindly, interested hairdressers. I have never understood this rule, but all the other writers will tell you this. It has something to do with spending the energy of your book in your excited retelling of the plot, when actually all that energy belongs on the page. Or something like that. You  just have to trust me on this: all your better writers won’t discuss their books.)

But there I go, blabbing away about my plot, which involves (here I go again, telling) a massive, almost unforgivable infidelity between a couple who has been married for a long time. The infidelity took place at the beginning of their marriage, and has been…well, smoothed over. So I’m telling her this story as she’s taking out the scissors and the combs, and she’s nodding and looking very, very interested, and so I’m telling more and more.

And then she says, “My father left my mother after 30 years of marriage, when I had just gotten married and was pregnant with my first baby. It turned out he had been having an affair, and he just left.”

Now is that fascinating or what? We got into such a wonderful conversation then–all the gory details of love affairs and how people find out, and how my characters find out and what happens next, and what happened to her mother, and how she wouldn’t speak to her father for years, and yes, he’s still with the other woman, but it’s very awkward, and how her mother tries hard to forgive him but can’t really, she’s broken now and has no self confidence…and we talk all the way through my haircut. By the end of it, we are so overcome with emotion that we have to HUG before we can go our separate ways.

And I go home and sit down and work on my book for the rest of the afternoon.

But then last night, as I was combing my hair before I went to bed, I noticed that…well, there’s a big chunk of hair that’s simply missing. On the right side. Like, ridiculously so. I can’t pull  my hair back anymore because on one side I seem to have  a pixie haircut and all the other sides are kind of regular…longish, even.

I have no idea what to do. The obvious lesson is: I should stay home and write my book, quietly, until my hair grows back in again. And when I go back to her later (as I will), and she asks me what I’m working on lately, I’ll say, “Ohhhh, nothing really,” and open a magazine. With a yawn.