That Braid

I can date this photograph to a single month: August 1976.

There’s a line in Bird Girl—not autofiction, but certainly inspired by my years in Soho—that appears in the opening pages:

“Lovers should be able to cut each other’s hair.”

That line came from life.

My boyfriend took a pair of scissors to the cowlick in the middle of my forehead because it displeased him aesthetically. He thought he could simply cut it away. I gathered the shorter hair into a braid, and there it is in this photograph—a bumpy row of knots catching the light on a hot summer day.

You can almost smell the garbage baking on Prince Street behind me.

For fifty years I’ve looked at this photograph and admired the confidence it projected. The sassy stance. The turned-up collar of a hand-me-down shirt dress. Canal Street bargain sunglasses. The unbuttoned shirt cinched with a wide red belt. The keys to my loft—four doors up on Greene Street—hanging from that belt, announcing that I’d arrived.

Barthes wrote that a photograph can contain a detail that wounds us.

For fifty years, I thought this photograph was about a young artist’s confidence.

Now I know the wound was wound into the braid.

The braid was a portent I didn’t yet know how to read.

I want to step into this photograph and warn her.

Run.

Run as fast as you can. Let the braid be the first warning. Leave before you begin mistaking criticism for intimacy. Join a women’s co-op. Show your work on your own terms. Collaborate. Find other women painters. Make one another braver.

She won’t listen. She can’t. She has no way of reading the braid on her forehead as anything more than an accident.

A photograph couldn’t tell her.

Perhaps that’s what novels can do.

They can send language backward, returning to a moment before I knew the braid was a warning.

It has taken me fifty years to write this warning onto the page.

Publication Day: August 6, 2026