by Lisa Congdon
I was determined not to become a science experiment, but I still batted around these questions for the next two weeks. By then, shiny silver roots mockingly revealed that this process would be nothing short of a meditation in patience. This was not just about waiting for hair to grow. The very public nature of what I was doing upped the ante, revealing sacrifice and acceptance.
“Are you going gray to go greener?” an old friend asked in all seriousness.
“I guess you could say that. The gloppidy concoction slathered on our scalps during the hair coloring process has only two places to go—into our bodies and down the drain—a double environmental whammy. Aren’t you worried?”
With my fresh awareness, I was privately hitting my hand against my head, thinking, Wasn’t everyone?
“My mother is 85. She still gets colored. I think the shade is ‘Frivolous Fawn,’” my friend responded.
“I’ve been doing research,” I said, “and more than 5,000 chemicals, some carcinogenic in animals, are used in hair dyes. The scalp has a rich blood supply, and absorbing dye every few weeks must have an impact on our health. Also, the American Cancer Society says that the National Toxicology Program has classified some chemicals that are, or were, used in hair dyes as ‘reasonably anticipated to be human carcinogens.’”
“Then how come everyone continues to color?” she asked.
“We know exposure to certain environmental toxins is linked to disease. We’re guinea pigs. For what? Beauty.”
To that, my friend responded, “To each their own.”
After that conversation, I came to suspect I would not be winning any popularity contests if every time a woman asked about my decision I spouted out a chemistry lesson.
Instead, I developed “graydar.” I started spotting women in the throes of all stages of the transition to natural hair. I saw them at the supermarket, on the train, on social media, in magazine articles. I came to love these unvarnished women. They were challenging rules, embracing science, and reimagining beauty. And seeing them around me helped me accept my own slow journey.
Going through a hair transition means facing a litany of truths and consequences—straddling the precipices of age, beauty, and health. By flexing my true roots, I joined a formidable sorority of women jumping off the precipice and into public middle age. It used to seem like such a long way down. Not so much anymore, thankfully.
Ronnie Citron-Fink is a writer and the editorial director for the Environmental Defense Fund’s Moms Clean Air Force. She is the founder of the blog Econesting. Ronnie is working on a new book, UNCOLOR: Do or Dye Essays.
was 72 years old during the Enlightenment era of the eighteenth century when she noticed how a piece of colored paper matched the dropped petal of a geranium, inspiring her to create the first of nearly a thousand cut-paper “mosaicks” of botanical subjects, rendered in exacting detail, pioneering the art of collage as we know it today.
Mary’s early life reads like a Jane Austen novel. Born in England in 1700 to an aristocratic family of limited means, she spent her early life with relatives learning music, needlecraft, and dance, hoping to become a lady-in-waiting at court. Instead, she was married off at age 17 to a drunken squire forty-five years her senior who she described in letters as “my jailor.” Widowed at 23, but given only a small stipend, she spent the next twenty years savoring her independence and cultivating friendships with Jonathan Swift, Handel, and the Duchess of Portland.
At age 43, she found a second chance at marriage and first chance at love with Patrick Delany, an Irish clergyman. She relocated to Dublin, and the two indulged in their shared passion for plants and botany, tending a lush garden estate together until Patrick’s death twenty-five years later. Widowed for a second time at age 68, Mary relied on her friendship with the Duchess of Portland, who had amassed an astonishing collection of natural history specimens and shared Mary’s love of fine art and decoration.
While Mary had always been artistic—crafting elegant gowns, needlework, and cut silhouettes—it was the discovery of layering paper to illustrate the exquisite intricacies of flowers that became her medium and true passion. “I have invented a new way of imitating flowers,” she wrote to her niece at age 72 with great excitement. She used hand-dyed paper and wallpaper scraps to fashion the illustrations with incredible detail, using hundreds of paper pieces for each picture, creating at once beautiful works of art and accurate botanical documents. Though her eyesight began to fail toward the end of her life, Mary continued her delicate pursuit until her death in 1788.
’s famous memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail was published when she was 43 years old. It took her two and a half years to trace the steps, challenges, and revelations she faced during her three-month, 1,100-mile hike from the Mojave Desert to the Pacific Northwest onto paper—and about two minutes for the finished book to land on the New York Times bestseller list. In the months following, Cheryl experienced instant fame—from Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 to the film adaptation championed by Reese Witherspoon and Nick Hornby, Wild went, well, wild. It is an international bestseller and a recipient of the Barnes & Noble Discover Award and the Oregon Book Award. Cheryl is also the author of the New York Times bestsellers Tiny Beautiful Things and Brave Enough. Her first novel, Torch, was published in 2007. Her essays have been published in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Vogue, and Tin House, among others, and her work has been selected three times for inclusion in the The Best American Essays. She anonymously authored The Rumpus’s popular Dear Sugar advice column from 2010 to 2012, for which she now cohosts a podcast. She currently lives and writes in Portland, Oregon.
Lisa: You worked for many years at writing, and it wasn’t until just a few short years ago, in your early 40s, you published the book that made you a household name. I encounter a lot of young artists who imagine that if they just concoct some magical formula they can have “instant success.” How would you describe the role of purpose, work, and patience in your own journey?
Cheryl: I was a successful writer long before Wild was published. What happened with Wild wasn’t “success.” It was crazy lightning striking. I’m always taken aback when people imply that I achieved success in my 40s. In fact, I had a pretty steady upward career trajectory as a writer, and all of that came about because, as you say, I showed up each day to do the work. I began publishing in my 20s. By the time I was in my early 30s I had won many awards and grants, and was publishing in respected magazines, and I’d earned my MFA in creative writing. In my mid-30s I sold my first novel to a major publisher and it was broadly reviewed and sold well. Meanwhile, I was continuing to publish essays in prominent places and I was also teaching writing. I was known in the literary community. Then Wild happened and with that came fame and a much broader international audience. It was astounding and glorious, but it didn’t, for me, mark the beginning of the sense that I’d arrived as a writer. I was already there and I’m still here—working my tail off. That’s the magic formula: work.
Lisa: One of the most life-changing lessons I’ve learned over the past ten years is the power of embracing all of my life experience, and this is something you write about as well. Why is this idea of owning and learning to love all of your experience (even the stuff that makes us cringe or that would normally make us feel shame), why is it so important?
Cheryl: I’ve long believed our mistakes and failures teach us as much as our victories and successes. When you acknowledge the full spectrum of your possibility—as both someone who can be great and as someone who is sometimes not so great—you can bring the full force of your humanity to everything you do.
Lisa: What for you is the best part of getting older?
Cheryl: Feeling more secure about who I am. Feeling stronger about being okay with disappointing people. Putting up less of a facade. Being gentler with myself and others, too.
Lisa: What do you think is the relationship between forgiveness and the ability to age joyfully?
Lisa: What are the three greatest lessons you’ve learned in the last ten years?
Cheryl: 1. Saying no is one form of saying yes. 2. Our ideas about famous people are projections of who we are, not a reflection of who they are. 3. Everyone struggles. Everyone hurts. Everyone wants to be told it’s all going to be okay.
Lisa: What advice do you have for women who fear getting older?
Cheryl: The fear of getting older is about the false notion that one’s power was rooted in the things that youth offers us—namely, beauty. My advice would be to see that for the lie that it always was. Our power is never about how pretty we are. Our power is about how we live our lives. Start living it.
, also known as the “Iron Nun,” the “Flying Nun,” and “the Mother Superior of Triathlon,” is a member of the Sisters for Christian Community in Spokane, Washington. In 2012, at the age of 82, she became the oldest person to complete an Ironman triathlon—that’s 2.4 miles of open-water swimming, 112 miles of cycling, and 26.2 miles of running—all within a seventeen-hour time period. She remains the current world-record holder.
Marie Dorothy Buder was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1930. At the age of 23 and against the wishes of her family, she made her vows to the Catholic Church and became a nun at Sisters of the Good Shepherd in St. Louis. She served there until the order sent her to Spokane in the early 1970s. It was then that she left the convent to join the Sisters for Christian Community, a nontraditional order.
At 48, with encouragement from a priest who detailed the activity’s benefits for mind, body, and spirit, Sister Madonna began running. Just five weeks after her training began, she ran her first race—the Lilac Bloomsday Run in Spokane. She continued to train and completed her first triathlon in Banbridge, Ireland, at the age of 52: the course was hilly, the water was freezing, and she rode the cycle portion on a secondhand men’s bike she’d bought at a police auction. Since that race in 1982, she was hooked, and has completed more than forty marathons and around 360 triathlons, including forty-five Ironman distances.
In the course of her career as a triathlete, she has pioneered participation in several Ironman age groups, opening the race to women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. At age 75, she was the oldest woman to complete an Ironman race, a record she proceeded to break the next year at 76 and again at age 79. She was determined to open the women’s 80-plus age group, and she did at Ironman Canada in 2012, in the same race that she captured the world record and became the oldest person to ever complete an Ironman. Sister Madonna was inducted into the USA Triathlon Hall of Fame in 2014.
left behind a two-decade-long career in dentistry to become a full-time writer at the age of 50. In 2000, she sold her practice, quit her teaching job, and relocated from Chicago to San Diego. She is now the author of two novels, Sky of Red Poppies, winner of the 2012 One Book, One San Diego Award, and Moon Daughter, which won Best Fiction in the 2015 San Diego Book Awards. She is also the first-place recipient of the prestigious California Stories award, and in 2004, her work was awarded Best Fiction at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. Born and raised in Iran, Zoe writes in both Persian and English, using fiction as a means to examine the experience of Iranian women. Hundreds of her short stories and articles have appeared in publications in the United States and abroad, and she has spoken at universities nationwide, including Georgetown University, UC Berkeley, and the University of Chicago, among others. She was a columnist for ZAN magazine and is currently finishing two new works of fiction.
Lisa: Let’s start by talking about your first career as a dentist. You trained as a dentist and practiced dentistry for two decades. You even taught dentistry at Northwestern University. How did you choose that as your first career?
Zoe: I grew up in Iran, where a dictatorship ruled the family, so being a good student, your choices would be in medicine, dentistry, engineering, and things like that. I loved literature. I’ve been a writer all my life, ever since grade school. And I wanted to be a writer, but my family wouldn’t even hear about it, because: “What’s literature going to do for you? You’ll be a teacher at the most. Who wants to be a teacher? You can be a doctor.” So I really was given no choice. The best I could do was to reduce my sentence from medicine to dentistry.
When I moved to the U.S. to be married (I had met my husband in London) they told me, “If you want to practice, you have to get your American boards.” It took me two more years to get my American boards, and by then, I had already worked so hard that I had to get some benefit from practicing. So I practiced for years.
And then one day when I was 50 years old, I was driving to my practice (and I had a very successful practice, I had about five thousand active patients), I was listening to public radio, WBEZ in Chicago, and somebody quoted the famous saying, “If you have always wanted to do something, do it.” This is a cliché, but I felt like I was hit with a ton of bricks. Why am I going to my dental office? Because at that same time, I had a tape recorder hanging from my rearview mirror, and during my commute, I would dictate Sky of Red Poppies, my first novel, to it so my secretary could transcribe it. Now I’m thinking, What are you doing? You no longer have to be a dentist! And so that was the day I put my practice up for sale.
Lisa: Literally, it happened the same day?
Zoe: The same day I ran the ad to sell my practice. My secretary thought something must have hit me and knocked me out of my mind, because I walked into the waiting room, gave her the tape from the day before, and said, “Please type this, but also while you’re at it, why don’t you type an ad to put in a magazine for selling the practice.” She said, “What happened, doctor? What happened?!” I said, “Nothing, I’ve just decided.”
Lisa: You said you’ve always been a writer and that you’ve loved writing since you were a little girl.
Zoe: Yes. And you know what is interesting? Not once, not once, in any of my dreams have I ever been a dentist. Can you believe that? Not once. So that tells you how much I was not a dentist at heart.
I was the youngest of seven children in my family, and I’d lost my parents at a young age. In the Middle East, you have to respect your older siblings. If they tell you to shut up, you can’t say, “Shut up, yourself.” You have to just be quiet about it. So I’d write my reactions in my diary. But the fact is that as a child, everyone knew that I had poetry and writing in me.
In junior high, I wrote a novel (they were always dark, dark stories) and my teacher loved it so much that every literature class would end ten minutes early so I could read episodes of my novel to the class.
Later, I wrote another novel, too. Unfortunately, both of those manuscripts are now lost. Because in those days, I’d write by hand and I had just one copy, so if that got misplaced, that was the end of that. And actually, the one copy of the story I had written about a girl who was mute, a friend did the calligraphy for it, and my classmates still remember the story. So I always got great encouragement from my literature teachers, and I never gave up.
My family didn’t want me to be a writer, so I would write short stories for a magazine under a pseudonym. I called myself “Lonely Bird,” and very few people knew that was me. Some of my work gained popularity. My poetry won me prizes and all that, but whenever I brought up the question of literature studies, the answer was an absolute no. Now that I’m a parent, I think part of the reason might have been that my poems and stories were so dark, so sad, that my family didn’t want to push me in that direction. They wanted me to go in the opposite direction and face the realities of life. I’m hoping that was part of their reason.
Lisa: Now that you are older, how do you feel?
&n
bsp; Zoe: I have started living! When people ask me how old I am, I say I am 16. Because I have really started to live ever since my first book was published in 2000.
Lisa: Your writing focuses on Iranian culture and history, with women’s experience as the lens. How does your experience as an immigrant influence your writing?
Zoe: My story as an immigrant is slightly different from most others, or at least most Iranian immigrants that you hear about. I moved here years before the Islamic revolution and the changes that followed. When I lived there, everyone was finishing their education abroad and going back to Iran for all the good jobs. I came here to be married, and the biggest negative point in that marriage was that I would not live in Iran. So immigration was this huge adjustment and a favor I had done for my husband, to move where he wanted to live.
The positive part was the new way of life—the purity of it. Because when you live abroad, you don’t see any of that. You see Americans as pushy people who only care about money, and nothing is beautiful or natural. And then you come here and see a whole different world. I loved it. I embraced it. And to this day I do. So, immigration had its positive and negative. And another difference was that I didn’t have a language barrier or culture shock. I had grown up with mostly European culture—it wasn’t as though I had to adjust to the food, language, or the way of life.
But why I write about Iran: Writers always say to write what you know best. The stories that I write about Iran, no one else could write. These are my stories, they are what I know best. So yes, I could write a story about the people of La Jolla, where I live now, and the characters, the people in my neighborhood, but then many other writers could write them, and even better.