Some Notes on Compulsive Hair Pulling

In 2008, The New Yorker published a piece called "The Itch." It was about a woman who picked through the skin on her scalp until she touched her own skull. Then she picked through her skull and touched her brain.

All week, everybody was buzzing about it. I didn't have a single conversation where we didn't talk about that lady — at least it seemed that way at the time.

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Sara Lautman is a cartoonist. Her drawings and comics have appeared in The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Awl, Bitch Magazine, The Morning News, The Rumpus and elsewhere. She lives in Baltimore.