Here’s one side effect I never expected after cancer treatments: curly hair.
I shouldn’t have been that surprised: Hair growing back curly after chemo is a fairly common experience. My friend Laura Ben-David, who died in 2025 after a long battle with ovarian cancer, sported some lovely curls in her final days.
My new curls highlight a long history with hair, both my personal story and how changing hairstyles often mirror cultural developments in society at large.
Sociologist Rose Weitz writes in her book Rapunzel’s Daughters, “Hair is one of the first ways we learn to tell the story of who we are.” UCLA historian Robin D.G. Kelley concurs. “Style is never superficial. It is how people make history visible on their bodies.”
My tale begins in elementary school, although I didn’t have much follicular autonomy back then: My parents kept my hair short and respectably suburban.
Entering junior high at the beginning of the 1970s, though, marked a turning point. I began sporting a quasi-Beatles cut with thick bangs (even if I was ten years too late to culturally appropriate true Beatlemania).
The main thing was my hair had to cover my ears. I wanted to appear like the hippies who populated nearby Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, even though I had no idea what a hippie actually was at the time.
At that age, unfortunately, I didn’t look particularly masculine. That led to a traumatic experience where a math teacher, substituting for my beloved Mrs. York, called on “the young lady in the back row.”
Yup, that was me.
The class erupted in laughter, and I became known for several years as “Briana.” (Any former middle school friends reading this: If you were part of that crew, an apology would be more than welcome.)
By high school, my hair still covered my ears, but now that I had more masculine features, I was ready for some facial hair. I wanted to mimic the looks of my favorite progressive rock stars, all of whom (other than Freddie Mercury of Queen) were properly bearded. However, my tenth-grade attempt to grow a mustache prompted my English teacher, Mrs. Andreski, to suggest I might want to consider using a black felt-tip pen to fill in the gaps.
Then, there was the summer when I tried to emulate the cool kids who parted their hair down the middle. I had my bangs cut specifically for that look, which would have worked out fine if not for Jeff Miller, reveling in his role as tormentor, who mocked me relentlessly until I sheepishly returned to the familiar side part before the school year started.
By college, I was finally able to grow a full beard and mustache, which I kept for the next twenty years. For two of the three years I attended Oberlin, I went entirely without a trim. When I posed with my friend Jane Segadelli next to a poster calling on support for the Sandinistas (as with the hippies, I had no idea what a Sandinista stood for), I looked every bit the Central American Marxist wannabe I wasn’t.
In the spring of my senior year, I came up with an experiment: I would cut it all – hair, beard, mustache – then show up to class, expecting that no one would know who I was!
Unfortunately, the weather took an unexpected wintry turn, and I had no choice but to come to campus in my highly identifiable orange down jacket.
Cover blown.
My hair grew progressively shorter as I gained in years. By the 1990s, then married and living in Israel, the clean-shaven look, bald-if-you-dared was all the fashion. I wasn’t ready to go entirely hairless, but let’s just say I never needed to run a comb through my hair.
When Covid hit in 2020, I stopped going to Dave, the only hairdresser I’d seen since we made aliyah 26 years earlier, and Jody became my in-house barber. She liked my hair longer. Cutting my hair in the living room meant I could get more frequent trims without needing to shell out a hundred shekels a pop.
Two years earlier, when I was diagnosed with cancer, to acknowledge this unwanted status, I defiantly grew my beard back, although it was more like George Clooney’s five o’clock shadow than a revolutionary pose.
Last year marked perhaps the final turning point. My hair style this time wasn’t tied to a particular decade or fashion. R-CHOP, a particular chemotherapy I’d hoped to avoid, became inevitable. I lost most of the hair on my head, as well as my arms, legs and pits. (Kept my eyebrows, fortunately.)
A few months after the CAR-T treatment I received a year ago that saved my life, my hair began to return as well. Jody noticed it first: thick curls on the left side of my head in the back. The curls spread – first upwards, then to the right side.
Jody loved it. Me? I’d spent 65 years with straight hair. What did I know from curls?
But as much as Jody loved running her fingers through my thick mane of flips and waves, it began to get unruly. Jody attempted a trim that would return some sense of order, but as she hacked away, the curls were inevitably sacrificed. The haircut looks great and the curls will, I’m sure, eventually grow back.
When they do, and assuming we can find a style that somehow maximizes both propriety and wild abandon, I will wear it with pleasure as a sign of my body’s resilience and the strange way it has of showing that off, both at the present moment and in the many hairstyles that have defined me through decades of personal and societal change.
I first wrote about my curls for The Jerusalem Post.
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