I Was Raised on Fairy Tales. No Wonder My Love Life Was Chaos
Pearl’s Hair Salon is a tiny place tucked around the side of an old four-storey apartment building. It’s within walking distance of my house in downtown Toronto, and for years, I’ve been sneaking into Pearl’s every month to have my roots touched up.
There are only three chairs facing the mirrors, and on busy days, Pearl darts between them like a hummingbird, multi-tasking to the ding of a timer. Sometimes young men come in for quick haircuts, but mostly it’s women my age, other pensioners who appreciate Pearl’s reasonable prices and the fact that her radio is always tuned to a soothing classical station. None of us minds the tired decor and the occasional blip when the air conditioner fails or the hot water inconveniently surges; we feel like a supportive community of like-minded souls, even though we’re strangers. We do what women have always done in the intimacy of a beauty salon: we let down our hair—we confide and confess; we talk about love.
As Pearl slathers brown dye on my hair, I strike up a conversation with the woman sitting in the chair beside me. Her grey-blonde hair is already plastered with streaks of gooey bleach, and folded strips of tinfoil stick out of her head like electrodes. We discover that we grew up in the same hometown, and she’s read my previous memoir, They Left Us Everything. Pearl knows all about that book, too, because when it won a prize, the shock caused bits of my hair to fall out.
“What are you writing about now?” the woman asks.
I never know how to answer this question when I’m struggling to write a new manuscript, so I just blurt out, “Old boyfriends!”
“Oh, I’ve got a few of those,” she says, “only now they’re old in more ways than one.”
“Which fairy tales were they?”
“Fairy tales?”
“You know . . .” I say, “like Sleeping Beauty when you were first kissed awake . . . or some Pied Piper who led you astray. You must have been Little Red Riding Hood once, weren’t you? Didn’t you ever meet a wolf?”
“Oh yes,” she says, nodding, “probably more than one.”
“See? And how about Cinderella? Didn’t you ever meet your prince?”
“Sure! Got married in my twenties, but it didn’t work out so well.”
“Same here.” I shake my head. “So, what happened to us? How come we kept falling for fairy tales?”
“Blame the Brothers Grimm!” she says, laughing.
“Exactly! I keep thinking about all the messages we got—be good little girls . . . stay on the path . . . wait to be rescued . . . one day your prince will come. Do you think we were groomed?”
“Doomed?” She fiddles with the cotton in her ears.
“Well, maybe that too.” I point to the celebrity magazine she’s flipping through. “Have you ever watched The Bachelor . . . or Say Yes to the Dress? We’re still buying this shit!”
Just then, Pearl’s timer dings. As she leads me over to the basin to lather shampoo through my hair, a lyric from South Pacific cascades through my ears. How many times have I tried to wash that man out of my hair? How many times have I sacrificed myself to romance? Postponed my dreams? Lost myself in a man? It was only once I’d left a man that I found myself again.
Pearl hands me a towel.
“You know what fairy tale I’m starring in now?” I say, clipping my hair back.
“No, what?”
“‘The Traveling Musicians’—it’s the one where a bunch of animals are told they’re too old to be useful, so they’re abandoned in the woods and left to die.”
“That sounds like me,” she says. “I used to live in a big house, but when my husband left me, I had to move out. I live alone in a seniors’ residence now. My children want me to wear an alarm in case I drown in the tub or fall over the balcony. It makes them feel better, but I hate it.” She smiles. “At least it’s not a nursing home . . . yet.”
“Well, there’s no nursing home in ‘The Traveling Musicians’! When the old animals meet each other, they decide to band together and create a whole new adventure. They reinvent themselves.”
That night, I invite my friend Les for a drink. It’s after nine o’clock. Most of my other friends are asleep by now, but I can always count on Les. She keeps artist’s hours, working into the night like I do, and her husband doesn’t seem to mind. For almost twenty years, we’ve been sharing our thoughts, reading aloud, facing our fears, propping each other up.
“I love coming to your house,” says Les, waving her arms around my front hall. “It’s so artistic!”
I recognize the word artistic as friend-speak for clutter. Books are strewn everywhere, overflowing from shelves and stacked on the floor. Unfinished paintings lean against walls, and an antique wool bathing suit dangles from a standing lamp. In the fridge, bottles of nail polish are nestled in the egg compartment, and whenever I go to get ice cubes, old paintbrushes wrapped in plastic bags to keep them pliable tumble out of the freezer. Forty years ago, when my three children were young, their friends said they felt so free here, mistaking the chaos for anarchy. “At least you’ll be safe from burglars,” quipped my brother Victor, “because who would break in, when every room looks ransacked already?”
Back then, as a single mother, when I had more imagination than money, I’d “renovated” my kitchen by mirroring all the walls. I told everyone it was to create the illusion of distance and space, but the real purpose was to see myself reflected into infinity to prove that I still existed. Now, when Les walks in, she sees the mirrors are covered with yellow sticky notes.
“Is this how you’re writing now,” she says, looking around, “using your mirrors as a bulletin board?”
“I’ve been rearranging those all week,” I say, “trying to find my theme.”
“I like this one!” She points to a note near the ceiling where I’ve written in big block letters: WHO AM I?
“That’s my biggest question!”
“It’s our universal question.” Les plonks her elbows on the counter to watch me make coffee. “Who am I now . . . and who was I then?”
“I can’t figure it out,” I shout over the hissing of the espresso machine. “How do we ever make sense of our lives when there are so many threads to untangle?”
“You can’t tie your life into a tidy bow,” says Les, tugging at her grey corkscrew curls. “It’s always going to be a straggly, messy, untidy thing.”
“But what did it all mean? They say if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll end up someplace else. But which of us ever knew where we were going? And now that we’re here—at this someplace else—how did we get here?”
“Exactly. We’re baffled. Old age has happened so fast.”
“My friend Pat says you can only know yourself through relationship . . . but in every relationship, I’ve been a different person.”
“How many relationships have you had?”
“I can’t remember! Sometimes I think I can . . . and then one night I’m lying in the bathtub, and I think, ‘Oh! I forgot about him!’”
Les laughs. “Me too . . . but I remember what his shoes looked like.”
“So how can we truly know ourselves?”
“That’s the thing. We may never know.”
“You can only know yourself through relationship . . . but in every relationship, I’ve been a different person.”
“But I knew who I was when I was eight—didn’t you? I was inventing products, producing plays . . . I’d even written my first book by then. Then something happened, and I lost my way! How do we drift so far away from our childhood dreams, from what we were meant to do?”
“Hormones!” says Les.
“Really? It’s that simple?”
“Sure! Don’t you remember how mesmerizing boys were? How alluring love was? When puberty strikes, we abandon ourselves.”
I switch on the tiny, white fairy lights that snake around my kitchen window, then light a candle and carry it outside to the patio table. Low in the sky, a summer moon hovers. We can hear the radio in the kitchen faintly playing jazz.
“Remember how we felt at seventeen?” Les says, collapsing into a wrought iron chair. “We felt so wild, so full of passion. There was such a long road ahead, like anything was possible!”
Despite what I look like on the outside—the sagging skin and gnarled arthritic joints—on the inside, I feel thirty-two. Les says she feels twenty-eight. Pat recently told me she feels forty-five, even though she’s ninety-five. We all have a young person locked inside, as if the clock had stopped, each of us channelling our best age, when we felt on top of the world. The passions we felt in our youth continue to flicker and ferment below the surface, waiting to be reignited, often erupting as fierce as ever, sometimes even more so.
I’m happy to look back at the forks in the road, sometimes with regret, but mostly with curiosity.
The reality is that my knob-and-tube wiring is too old to replace. Barnacles have started to appear on my back. I find myself worrying about weather forecasts and the rising price of gasoline just like my mother did, and I carefully clutch railings as I descend subway stairs, my pockets full of tissues now to dab at my eyes when the wind blows. The third finger on my right hand is often locked when I wake in the morning, so I pry it open using the edge of my mattress.
I used to use my mattress for other things.
I have no wish to compete with the young: to inject Botox, lift my face, or ingest hormones to embrace a man on Viagra. Somebody needs to show the younger generation what old age looks like. It might as well be me.
On the other hand, maybe we should all wear T-shirts emblazoned with photos of our younger selves to remind others what we used to look like. We all looked gorgeous then, we just didn’t appreciate it. These days, whenever I look in the mirror, I try to remind myself that I’ll never look younger than I do today. At seventy-seven, my wrinkles are coming along just fine, delicate criss-crossed lines that look like crushed silk, the kind I always wanted, and I’m glad I no longer care so much about the shape of my eyebrows. I’m happy to embrace my interior landscape, to spend my time thinking, assessing, looking back at the forks in the road, sometimes with regret, but mostly with curiosity, trying to make sense of the choices I made—searching for meaning.
What were the themes of my life, my failings, my plot? All good stories take shape. Some look like waves that build to crescendos, others like steps to the top of a mountain. It feels like I’ve been swept out to sea every seven years or so, but I’ve also plunged off a few cliffs. Perhaps mine wasn’t one long journey. Perhaps I’ve lived many short stories all strung together.
So, why am I still rearranging those sticky notes?
Is it possible that all my romantic adventures had elements of a fairy tale? How is this possible when I was raised in the twentieth century . . . by a feminist?
I go to my bookcase and take out The Blue Fairy Book, the one I remember from childhood. Mum must have thought it was harmless; it was hers before mine, and Granny’s before hers, originally published in 1889. It used to sit by my bedside, luring me in with its gold-embossed cover and secretive etchings, the first one hiding behind a thin veil of tissue. Peeling back the veil was like opening a magic door.
By the time I’ve connected my real-life enchantments to that small, gilded book, I realize I’ve traipsed through so many tropes—romantic clichés like “Cinderella,” “The Pied Piper,” “Rapunzel,” and more—enthralled by the drama of it all. How many other young girls were seduced by these scripts? Even the costumes—the peasant blouse, dirndl, and clogs; the ball gowns, girdles, and gloves; the aprons, slippers, and rags—I think I’ve owned them all.
“We have to make myths of our lives; it is the only way to live them without despair.”
Nobody really knows where fairy tales originated. They’ve been circulating for thousands of years in almost every culture on earth, embedded by now in the bedrock of our psyches, their plots metastasizing into every soap opera ever produced.
I like to think they originated with women, generations of old wives who’d already lived them, who knew a thing or two about the frailties of human nature, women who whispered their stories to each other as they hung their washing and waited on shore for their men to return from sea. They probably hoped to warn us . . . and I should have paid closer attention. But since when do any of us learn from history? We don’t even listen to our mothers.
Instead, I frolicked through my roles without much care for the consequences. I expected to “let down my hair” or be “kissed awake” and carried away by a prince who would cut through brambles to reach me. He’d throw off his cloak, kneel at my feet, and declare his undying love. I’d learned, of course, that he’d come disguised as a beggar (or was it a frog . . . or a beast?) and reveal himself once I kissed him. My love would fix and restore him . . . if only I loved him enough. But later, in real life, a plot twist would shock me: a prince might turn into a beggar, or a frog into Bluebeard—it was all so confusing—yet most of the time I hung in there, still thinking I was doing Cinderella. Some princes hung around all my life, even after the slipper didn’t fit, they—or I—holding a torch that never quite quit and becoming instead “the one who got away.”
The trouble with fairy tales is that they’re not true, yet they weave in and out of our hopes and dreams, fuelling our fantasies for the rest of our lives. In her memoir, Plant Dreaming Deep, May Sarton wrote: “We have to make myths of our lives; it is the only way to live them without despair.”
Adapted and excerpted from The Trouble with Fairly Tales: A Memoir by Plum Johnson. Copyright © Plum Johnson 2025. Published by Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
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