This may come as a shock to you, especially if you’ve spent the past few years using my byline photo as a reference, but I am bald now. Completely, permanently, irreversibly bald. So bald that my children have taken to calling me Egg. So bald that the first thing strangers notice about me is my scalp, rather than my excessively sour personality. So bald that, if I stand under just the right sort of overhead light with just the right level of perspiration, I in effect transform into a sort of sentient disco ball.
I am telling you this upfront because baldness has endowed me with a renewed sense of defensive self-deprecation. If you meet me and I don’t attempt to get ahead of the curve by drawing attention to my lack of hair with a bad joke, know that something has gone terribly wrong. I am so determined to inform everyone that I am bald, despite the wealth of visual evidence already at hand, that I have just written a book about going bald. It is called Bald. It has an egg on the front.
