A RIBBON FOR YOUR HAIR
Loss, More Loss. And How We (Sort of) Went On
By Stephen Policoff: Heliotrope Books (March 24, 2026)
How does one move on after unbearable loss? What enabled Stephen Policoff, an award winning novelist, to carry on in the wake of the deaths of both his wife and daughter.
When his adopted daughter Anna was four, a freak accident landed her in the grim emergency room of Manhattan’s Saint Vincent Hospital, where he and his wife were first accused of child abuse, and then informed that she had an enlarged liver and spleen.
Policoff and his wife consulted seven doctors over seven months, ending up at the Mayo Clinic where Anna was diagnosed with Niemann-Pick Type C, a rare, fatal illness.

And with that, their previously placid lives imploded.
Despite the dire prognosis, the couple (with Anna’s urging) decided to adopt Jane from China and managed to forge a facsimile of normal family life. As Anna and Jane grew up, the couple desperately sought treatment to ameliorate her strange, almost surreal symptoms.

By puberty, Anna’s developmental delays became more pronounced and her symptoms worsened. Through it all, Anna displayed an unusually empathic nature, a great sense of humor, love for her younger sister and Broadway musicals. And she loved to sing! As Policoff writes, “music was magic to Anna, medicine and salve.”
A Ribbon for Your Hair is about finding laughter and beauty even in the shadow of death, about the struggle to transcend sorrow, about watching Anna’s friends rally around her, and about the unanticipated joy of seeing Jane—now a graduate of NYU with an art-world job— somehow flourish despite the darkness.
A mosaic of memoir, medical information, despair and dark humor, an investigation into seizures, A Ribbon for Your Hair uncovers the meaning of grief, and of abiding love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Stephen Policoff’s first novel, Beautiful Somewhere Else, won the James Jones Award and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. His third novel, Dangerous Blues, was published in2022 by Flexible Press. He is Clinical Professor of Writing in Liberal Studies at NYU. Several pieces of this memoir were first published in december, Riddlebird, Entropy Literary Journal, and Oyster River Pages. A section on Anna’s joyous experience in music therapy won the Fish Short Memoir Award in 2012, and subsequently appeared on music therapy websites around the world.