The Summer of Her Baldness by Catherine Lord

When artist and writer Catherine Lord was diagnosed with breast cancer, she turned her treatment into an involuntary performance piece, adopting the online persona of 'Her Baldness,' an irascible, witty, polemical voice writing candidly about shame and fear to her listserv. Drawing on those e-mails and her own photographs, Lord describes support groups, her ambivalence about Western medicine, the strain on her relationship with her partner, and being mistaken for a 'sir,' and talks back to a society that stigmatizes bald women and middle-aged lesbians with a life-threatening disease.