Like most 20-somethings, I love Fleabag. I love its unwashed, badly-behaved protagonist, its scandalous humour, its sensitivity to the unique challenges facing young people in our increasingly weird world, and its myriad quotable lines.
Fleabag is so full of iconic quotes that it’s hard to choose the best. But when it comes to the topic of hair, one surges above the tide:
Hair. Is. Everything.
Such a truism might seem like it needs no contextualisation, but the events surrounding this quote are important. Fleabag says it to her sister’s hairdresser after an unfortunate cut leaves Claire looking “like a Pencil”, the integrity of which you can verify based on the picture below.
Incensed that anyone with responsibility over another person’s hair would execute a haircut so offensive that the only word of comfort that can be offered is that “it’s French”, Fleabag rips the hairdresser a new one, telling him:
Hair is everything. We wish it wasn't, so we could actually think about something else occasionally, but it is. It's the difference between a good day and a bad day. We're meant to think that it's a symbol of power. That it's a symbol of fertility. Some people are exploited for it and it pays your fucking bills! Hair is everything, Anthony.1
The irony, as we learn, is that Claire asked for this haircut. When Anthony shows Fleabag Claire’s reference photo – a crumpled ad featuring the kind of high-fashion ‘do that should never be seen off a runway – we realise that he gave her exactly what she asked for. Anthony didn’t make a mistake, he just didn’t clock that Claire might be seeking more than a haircut could give, and that he should steer her in a different direction.
At this point in the show, Claire is contemplating leaving her philandering husband for the man she’s been having an affair with, and we get the sense, as Anthony should have, that her haircut is some attempt to wrest control over a life that has sprawled away from her. Though the cut doesn’t have the desired effect, it nonetheless valorises Fleabag’s point: hair is everything, especially when it’s all you have.
Thinking about this scene brought to mind an equally iconic fictional hair disaster. A major theme of the Anne of Green Gables books is Anne’s attempt to make peace with her red hair. Anne describes her red hair as “her lifelong sorrow”, and asserts that “people who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble is”. So when Anne encounters a peddler touting a hair dye he “positively assure[s]” will turn her hair “a beautiful raven black”, Anne buys the bottle. The only problem is that it turns her hair green. Marilla is characteristically sarcastic, telling Anne, “If I’d decided it was worth while to dye my hair I’d have dyed it a decent color at least. I wouldn’t have dyed it green”, before proceeding to “shingle the hair as closely as possible. The result was not becoming, to state the case as mildly as may be.”2
Anne of Green Gables is a book aimed at children, therefore didactic and often a little on-the-nose in its lessons – this one a denouncement of vanity and self-adornment. But the moment has enough humour that it always makes its way into film adaptations of the book, and has a ring of “hair is everything”.
Anne’s red hair is a source of criticism and torment from her peers, and is the spark of the first unfortunate encounter between Anne and her future husband Gilbert, over whose head she breaks her school slate after he calls her “carrots”. We understand why Anne is self-conscious of her hair when all the heroines she is exposed to have “a beautiful rose-leaf complexion… starry violet eyes”, and “hair a glorious black, black as a raven’s wing”. We sympathise with her attempt to find an easier passage through life by changing an aspect of her appearance that allows her to fit the aesthetic norm (I doubt any of us could say we haven’t partaken of such efforts ourselves). For Anne, even if her red hair isn’t everything, it’s a lot – enough to risk social condemnation for vanity in dying it and for diverging from social norms in cutting off the disastrous results.
These moments that put the social meaning and value of hair in the spotlight sprung to my mind for one obvious reason: cancer = hair loss. It was one of the first things I thought about after I was diagnosed. When I called my mum to tell her the news, I lamented that I was going to lose my hair. At that moment, as the enormity of what was happening to me started to settle, I was looking for tangible things to grasp onto and feel sad about. Cancer is such a loaded diagnosis, it has such immense cultural meaning, that even when it’s curable it's impossible to look it squarely in the eye. I could only look at it from certain angles, process facets of reality, and that first facet was the fate of my hair.
So I decided to cut it all off. While it might be easy to try and shrug off the decision to cut off my (beautiful, oh, so beautiful) locks with a dismissive, “It’s just hair”, that wouldn’t be truthful. For a while, I didn’t know whether I would let it fall out naturally or cut it all off at once. Once I decided, the choice felt easy – but that’s only because I had spent days ruminating over it, I had wonderful family around me supporting the decision, and my sisters, partner, father, and sister’s boyfriend all decided to join me with varying degrees of hair alteration. Calling it “just hair” would erase those acts of solidarity. It would diminish the symbolic meaning that the decision has taken on. Like Claire, it represents my attempt to exert some agency over my life and a body that feels like it has betrayed me. It also marks the beginning of a journey I can’t resist.
And there have been other comforts in what might seem like a drastic decision. While I didn’t dye my hair green before, I did “shingle the hair as closely as possible” – which gave me another opportunity to feel kinship with Anne Shirley. It’s also been funny to remind myself that I have always wanted to see how I look a buzzcut, to recall the younger version of myself that had the guts to want to try something that remains unconventional for women. I would give anything for the circumstances to be different, but they aren’t, so I might as well take the small wins. I’m trying to embrace what I can embrace.
You can watch the scene in all its glory below:
For those who wish to experience Anne’s anguish for themselves:
Oh my word, I love this piece Izz! You're incredible - so brave and courageous ❤️❤️
I love Fleabag, too. And I am celebrating your courage ♥️