When Stuart Heritage began his memoir about hair loss, the British author, columnist and television writer had agonizing anxiety about his own. “Does the state of my head signal to the world my capacity to live with failure?” he writes in Bald. “You bet it does.” Years of his life were spent trying trims and treatments in hopes of halting the inevitable – all at the expense of his sanity. “By thirty-four, I had become a nervous wreck, my hair less a traditional haircut and more an ornate but useless flap.” Nearing the end of his rope, he took the plunge and shaved it all off.

How, then, would the beaten-down hero find peace beneath his freshly mown scalp? With ample sensitivity to match his wit, Heritage tackles myriad emotional obstacles – rage, embarrassment, fear and helplessness – along his path to self-love, relying on guidance from a female friend, a barber, a stylist and chrome-domed idol Larry David. Bald is the perfect read for anyone afflicted with recession depression – although, attention Christmas shoppers, its author warns it might be an offensive gift. It’s airy, uplifting and packed with enough self-deprecating jokes to make even hair-havers crack a smile. To go bald, Heritage writes, “is to realize that if you had died as a caveman, archaeologists would have almost certainly dug you up and made a big deal about having discovered a new type of human called Crap Skull Man.”

In the following excerpt, Heritage explains how he turned his resentment into appreciation. 

The moment that Larry David complimented my head, something did really change inside me. I went and looked in a mirror, and you know what? I looked okay. For the first time, I actually felt okay about being bald. It was a lovely feeling, but even without Larry’s help I’m sure I would have got there eventually.

This book came about in anger. I was furious when I went bald. Furious at the unfairness of it. Furious about how weird it made me look. Furious that I had nothing to hide my lopsided ear behind any more. At first, I only wanted to write this book because I wanted to let the world know how unbelievably angry I was about suddenly being bald.

But then a weird thing happened. In the process of writing this book, I slowly started to feel more and more comfortable with how I looked. And this is because the same thing kept coming up again and again and again, with Fiona and Mark and Anthony and Larry. No matter who I spoke to, it kept beating me over the head: 

You’re not going to come to terms with being bald until you decide to come to terms with it.

There’s no blueprint for baldness. There is no one set way that will make everybody happy. Whatever works for you is the thing you should do. You can be a skinny bald or a tubby bald. You can be a bearded bald or a babyface bald. You can be a smart bald or a scruffy bald. Keep the hair around the ring. Lose the hair around the ring. Build a cock-shaped rocket and fly it to the moon like Jeff Bezos did. In the end – and I really mean this with all my heart – it really doesn’t matter.

True, you might reach some form of acceptance by blindly following a handful of preordained tips. But that would be external acceptance, and external acceptance really isn’t worth a damn. Chase that and you’ll find yourself back at the starting line, killing yourself to be something you’re not simply because you want to fit in. People can see right through that. You’d see right through it, too.

Instead, the trick is to just be what you actually are. And what you are is (probably) a bald man. Honestly, that’s brilliant. It might not feel like that now. You might be so new to baldness that you still feel as if there’s a lighthouse sitting on your head, permanently blasting out the message that you’ve got something wrong with you. You might feel like all your masculinity evaporated the day you stopped buying hair gel. You might be overwhelmed by the thought of becoming defined by the one part of your body that nobody has seen since you were a baby. That’s your scalp, by the way. Get your brain out of the gutter.

But this feeling passes. I promise it does.

Excerpted from ‘Bald: How I Slowly Learned to Not Hate Having No Hair (And You Can Too)’ by Stuart Heritage. ©2024 Stuart Heritage. Published by Profile Books.

A version of this story appeared in the Oct-Nov. 2024 issue of Zoomer magazine on pg. 18, titled “Not a Hair in the World.”