Cutting My Mother's Hair is a contemporary, feminist engagement with Dante's Inferno. It is also a portrait of society's lack of compassion for those who suffer from mental illness. Taking as its inspiration the great Italian epic, this book depicts contemporary women in various stages of domestic hell and interrogates their familial and social inheritance of patriarchy. The final section creates a fictional story of two women caught in the rings of the Inferno, suffering breakdown, for whom there is no compassion.