From the time I did a comb out on my first long haired doll, I knew I wanted to be a hairdresser.  Not too surprising, as it runs in both sides of my family.  My grandfather and great grandfather were barbers and my great aunt a hairdresser and salon owner, and now, a niece following in our footsteps.  What did surprise many of my friends was that I’d become an author…but that comes later.

I grew up in Boston practicing frosting hair with a rubber cap and crochet hook on my high school girlfriends.  It seemed only natural I would go to beauty school after graduation and seven years later opened my own salon.  Since then, I’ve had my haircoloring work published in Elle magazine, done hair for the Miss America Scholarship Pageants, taught haircare at a modeling school, did theatre work, mentored, and performed services for cancer patients, which I am a survivor of myself.

In 1997 my husband and I moved to Nashville to pursue his songwriting career, where he wrote country music and I did hair, lucky enough to serve Nashville’s great people and music industry. And here we are in 2015, eighteen years later, with two grandchildren now, moving back to Boston to be with our family again.

So how did I go from hairdresser to first time novelist?  Originally, I thought I’d write a textbook that would teach beauty school students the one thing they’ll never learn in class…how to be a (psychiatrist), and how to deal with their clients emotional ups and downs and not take it all home with them.  When I found what I wanted to say and put it all on paper, I showed it to my husband.  In his writers mind he thought it would make a good novel instead of a textbook and encouraged me in that direction.  It’s all thanks to him I turned it into Towel Dry and a Good Cry.

My grandfather and his barber bag.

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