Let Down Your Hair

LoveReading Says

Perfectly plaiting the brutal world of content creation, family tragedy and alopecia to create an ingeniously inspiring re-telling of Rapunzel, Bryony Gordon’s Let Down Your Hair is simply incredible. Exploring depression, anxiety, the generational impact of addiction, and bereavement with honesty and remarkable empathy, it also presents the glory of self-determination and friendship with life-affirming power. I couldn’t recommend it more.

Since the day she was born, Barb’s glorious hair has defined her existence, and the same is true as she turns sixteen. Friendless and lonely, living on the upper floors of a tower block with her aunt, thanks to her hair - the fetishized focus of her social media channel - Barb has hundreds of thousands of online “friends”. Her hair is her future, a gleaming source of fame and fortune. In the words of Jess, her former best friend, “you’re nothing without your hair”, and Barb believes it.

Thankfully, after leaving school with no GCSEs, Barb’s flighty aunt scores her an interview with a major agency for content creators, and she finds herself thrust into a cut-throat world of fakery, referred to as her new handle, @letdownyourhair, rather than her own name. 

Barb’s complex personal struggles — guilt that she’s ruined her loved ones’ lives, loneliness, lack of self-esteem, depression — are evoked with impactful, empathetic intensity. And then she finds a bald patch. Though horrifying at first, this gives Barb “a strange new energy”.

Mention must be made of Barb’s uplifting friendship with @IAmZal, a visually impaired activist who stepped away from the clutches of Barb’s agency. Through Zal Barb learns to make her channel accessible, and discovers “there was a whole other world out there…a world that was richer and greater and far more sympathetic than the one she had witnessed during her short time with Spark Enterprises.”

After surviving a mental health rollercoaster, after truths come to light, Let Down Your Hair comes to a jubilant, life-affirming climax that will have readers weeping with joy.

Joanne Owen

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