There are some good pieces here, Deborah Tannen's is particularly excellent and Marita Golden, Ru Freeman, and Adriana Trigiani also impressed. But the vast majority of these essays are the reminiscences of middle class white women of a certain age (often Jewish), and as a result there is a repetitiveness that makes this a bit of a slog. I am a middle class Jewish white woman of a certain age. My mother told me how ugly my hair was pretty much daily until the day she died. Through my teen years (until I put my foot down in 11th grade) she took me to a straightening place in a particularly rough Detroit neighborhood to try to make it less horrible. After straightening it really was ugly. As an adult I have come to kind of love my hair, and like many of the authors in this anthology, that evolution dovetails with a broader acceptance of self. Certainly there were many points on which I connected to the pieces, but that still doesn't make the 5th story about how someone had their mother iron their hair on an ironing board more appealing. If I was not reading this for the Book Riot challenge I imagine I would have abandoned ship. 300 pages on feelings about hair is just more than I can take. YMMV