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So I’ve gotten a few emails from readers who were confused at my post, below, on how curly my hair is, since my author photo shows me sporting a nice, sleek, straight bob. Which reminds me of a conversation I had with a woman who came to a reading I did last year.

She approached the table where I was signing books. I smiled at her encouragingly. She looked me over critically, then studied my publicity photo, before turning back to stare at me some more.

“You look different in person,” she finally said.

I had no idea if this was a good thing or a bad thing. But I suspected from the way she was staring at me that it wasn’t meant to be a compliment.

“It’s your hair,” she said. “It looks much . . ..” She paused. “Bigger in person.”

“Bigger,” I repeated. I stopped smiling.

“Ummm, yes. You know: wavier.”

“I had it straightened the day the photo was taken,” I explained.

“Oh,” she said. “I like it better that way.”

Ohhhh-kay.

My dad had a similar reaction when he first saw the photo.

“You should wear your hair like that all the time,” he said. “It’s really flattering.”

“To get it to look like that, I paid fifty dollars to have my stylist spend an hour blow-drying it straight,” I said. “It was painful, expensive and time consuming.”

“And your point?” my dad said.

Grrrrrr.

Anyway, yes, these days I do straighten in the winter. (Thank God for my Chi.) But when you live in a hot, humid, sub-tropical climate, straightening your hair in the summer is a losing battle. I could spend an entire hour blowdrying, ironing and spraying it into submission, and then walk out the front door into one of our frequent summer rain showers, and poof, just like that, this happens:

Posted 16 July 2007 at 08:20 AM