Sophie is facing a rare cancer at the age of twenty one. In The Girl with Nine Wigs, a diary written with European openness and hard hitting humour, she shares the journey she didn’t expect to take.
No eyelashes, no hair on her head, Sophie seizes the challenges of cancer treatment, adopting new personae with each new wig. She picks green feather eyelashes to wear with Platina, the wig that says, ‘Yes, indeed, I’m wearing a wig.’

“time could take away my weddings and divorces, my children and corrective underwear.”

No amount of dressing up takes away from the scary knowledge that every twinge, every headache could be a new tumour. Sophie writes honestly about the changes to her body, like the first hair loss – her pubes – and how this impacts on the life of a 21 year old student. She writes about her first time clubbing after five months in hospital, about meeting new guys, and dates and sex when she has to wonder whether her wig will come off.

Sophie has some great friends, some from ‘before cancer’, some who she meets as part of her new experience. She has a supportive family, who have just gone through the challenge of her mother’s breast cancer. She has humour and perspective on her side as she writes, but throughout all the positives her very real battle comes out.

Every person’s story is unique, every person with cancer has a different experience, but in The Girl With the Nine Wigs Sophie Van Der Stap has truly written something unusual and well worth reading. You can also hear Sophie’s story … and meet some of the wigs … in her TEDx talk. The Girl with Nine Wigs: A Memoir  costs around £8.99 in paperback or £2.99 on Kindle at time of writing.