The Significance of Curly Hair

A Loving Memoir of Life and Loss

De: Kara L. Zajac

Narrado por: Meagan Kirby

Growing up, Gram was my best friend. We shared a double bed in my family’s cottage until I was nine. Fifteen years later, I got the call that she’d fallen and hit her head. All I could see was her mouthing, “Don’t you love me enough to come back home?” I wept on the plane as I began to write her story, the one she’d asked me to write in ninth grade.

Gram and I were polar opposites. She spent much of her life barefoot and pregnant. I was a gay, career-driven, independent decision-maker.

Searching through old relics, we found a time capsule in Gram’s drawer, revealing clues to her dark era, her 1957 breakdown. Dark green pills, a bank book, scribbles on an envelope: answers to unasked questions. She survived stress and abuse without things I take for granted: income, a car, stocked pantry shelves. She did it all with unconditional love, never revealing her pain.

I’d spent my adult life avoiding becoming a “traditional” woman, but her death freed something in me. I realized the importance of child-rearing, understanding a woman like me can balance career and family. Love and support create happy, healthy kids. I could pass Gram’s spirit onto a child, braiding generations together from lifetime to lifetime.

©2024 Kara L. Zajac (P)2025 Kara L. Zajac

Delightful and Poignant

Kara, who moved from New England to Georgia several years prior gets a jarring call from her mother letting her know that her grandmother took a fall and it’s not looking good. Kara hops on a flight home that day… we find out her grandmother’s fate which is predicably not good.

The story then begins to unfold in a unique way, the author takes us to her grandmother’s childhood so we get a sense of her beginnings, to her adulthood, marriage, children so we get the continuation of the events that took place that shaped her as a human that gave her tremendous wisdom, patience and strength. The story then toggles back to current day – where Kara reconnects with family, making new discoveries about some of them, even making discoveries of her grandmother in the process of sorting through her items / pictures and discoveries about herself in the process.

The mixture of traveling back in time to present day is interesting and engaging. We see how her grandmother’s life evolved and changed from childhood to present day… all of the experiences whether gloriously happy or unimaginably sad shaped her into the woman everyone in the family adored and admired. As we move through the present day excerpts, it’s clear that the planning of her services and the pain of losing her hits the family hard but the sad event also brings them together to honor their beloved gram.

The story is sweet, honest, engaging and most of all relatable. Loss, love, family, reconnection, self-discovery… common threads to all of us. The story is told in such a lovely, loving, honest way, you can’t help but fall in love with gram and her family.

The title is the best and I won’t give away how that came to be, you will have read [or listen] to the book to find out!

Highly recommend this unique gem!