Jodi Picoult
Picoult’s “Sing You Home”
We here at NaturallyCurly are obsessed with curls, ringlets, kinks, and waves. So, when we find out that curly author Jodi Picoult was heading to our home base of Austin, we jumped at the chance to sit down and chat with this curly girl.
Picoult has released a new novel, “Sing You Home,” and has been traveling across the country in promotion of this new and refreshing story on what modern day love is, and the evolution of the nuclear family. The story follows Zoe, a musical therapist on a life journey who discovers her true self in the process of finding love with another woman. The author mentions that her son had recently come out of the closet, and she felt that if she could give a voice to a certain audience, then she would. “Love is love,” Picoult states when I ask her about the audience that she is writing for.
But while the new book was obviously the reason Picoult came to town, I couldn’t just sit there looking at her perfectly defined curls—the kind of curls you could only dream about—without blurting out “What do you put in your hair?” She has Ouidad—the Queen of Curls—to thank for it.
“I was just in New York to get my hair done,” Picoult informed me. She said Ouidad has been carving and slicing her curls for years. We both gush about what an amazing woman Ouidad is, and I told her about the first Ouidad haircut I recently received in Chicago, which has has changed my life.
Picoult wasn’t always at peace with her curls.
“I hated my hair growing up,” she confided. “My mother chopped off my hair into this short shag when I was 5.”
She cringes at the memory, and we both laugh in that way that curlies instantly bond over shared hair nightmares. I noted that almost all mothers did that to their curly daughters at some point. We talked about how long she has been embracing those oh-so-perfect curls, and she told me that after trying every chemical ingredient under the sun, she started wearing her hair in its natural curly form right around the time she was in college.
“I finally embraced it,” Picoult said.
Sounds like the making of her next novel.
