A dark, comic, strangely endearing novel, Hair for Men by Michelle Winters is a bizarrely endearing novel, despite its heavy storyline. Louise is destined to take up haircutting scissors after her father’s career is spent selling shampoo. After a humiliating and traumatizing incident with a boy named Mitch in school, she decides to take up punk violence instead, but after her parents die on a trip to Cape Breton and she manages to graduate from high school, she drops her punk lifestyle and goes to learn how to cut hair — a trade which takes her from a men’s hair salon to a boat docked in Saint John, New Brunswick, where she tries to erase her past, until it walks onto the marina to find her.
Lou is tough and funny, and also heavily punished for the crime of not being conventionally attractive. Hair for Men is a critical look at the patriarchy, taking it to extremes — Lou avoids men outside of cutting their hair first, and later, the men she works with on the boat in Saint John, but also spends her night hours dropping bodies of men into the Bay of Fundy as punishment for their behaviour. It’s irreverent, but really, what would you do, if you could, to those who cause you harm? Or others?
Ther are two major high points to Lou’s story: one, when the salon she works at, called Hair for Men, is raided by the police and she remains the lone innocent, because she really was doing men’s hair, and simply listening to them talk. The second is when Mitch, the man who humiliated her as a teenager, and has been appearing through the years, shows up in Saint John, and is on her boat with his daughter.
Winters is sharp with her commentary on the damage of patriarchy; even as Lou tends to be all-or-nothing, there are multiple enraging and tender layers to the men who walk through Lou’s life.
Hair for Men is quirky. Winters is sharp with her commentary on the damage of patriarchy; even as Lou tends to be all-or-nothing, there are multiple enraging and tender layers to the men who walk through Lou’s life. Forgiveness and how to make yourself want to give it is a major thread in this novel too, but what shines the most is the fully realized characters. Even those who make the briefest of appearances have rich lives and stories, which Winters manages to convey in small slices of life. Hair for Men is a slim novel about so much, but most wonderfully, a brilliant set of characters we get to enjoy for only too few pages.
MICHELLE WINTERS is a writer, painter, and translator born and raised in Saint John, NB. Her debut novel, I Am a Truck, was shortlisted for the 2017 Scotiabank Giller Prize. She is the translator of Kiss the Undertow and Daniil and Vanya by Marie-Hélène Larochelle. She lives in Toronto.
Publisher: House of Anansi Press (August 20, 2024)
Paperback 5.25″ x 8″ | 216 pages
ISBN: 9781487011918
Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.
- Alison Manleyhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/alison-manley/
- Alison Manleyhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/alison-manley/
- Alison Manleyhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/alison-manley/
- Alison Manleyhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/alison-manley/
- Alison Manleyhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/alison-manley/
- Alison Manleyhttps://miramichireader.ca/author/alison-manley/
