Two weeks later I’d created a rose-gold cataclysm that was nine feet high and eighteen feet wide. In that painting lived an expression of the pink hair on my head and what it cost me over the years. I calculated the time and money spent on my hair (my time being valued at $25.00 per hour) and arrived at a figure of $31,492.00, give or take a thousand. That painting was the pain of earning the money to begin with; the egoistic joy it brought me to spend it on such a temporary adjustment; the time wasted getting my hair yanked and cut and painted and blown out; and the burning on my scalp each and every time it was double-processed back into the trademark pink-champagne cloud that I’ve worn since my teens in some form or another. A name fell out of my mouth. One year and five more paintings later, I had a show, Accounting for Taste, at Parker Projects, a respectable gallery in Chelsea, and my career found its first real foothold.

The first piece of mine to land in a real collection was 31,492 (Hair Money). Soon after, 7,067 (Tampons and Ruined Underwear Money); 6,413 (Fingernail Money); 278,388 (Teeth Money); 4,875 (Ripping Hair Out of My Cunt Money); and 7,049 (Bra Money) were getting packed up and shipped out, too. Parker sold them all. I got 50 percent. Parker’s tax man showed me how to keep most of it. Everything went back into my work.

I had stumbled, if unwittingly, onto one of the art world’s invisible rules: Make something people can talk about. According to Claymont Parker, in my case, that meant two specific things: how detailed the paintings were, and the personal nature of the titles. “People are so bored of this masculine disaffected-artist-assistant-factory bullshit,” he said. “You’re part of a new wave of female artists whose work is personal. These paintings are very clearly the product of a young woman alone in a studio. So—intimate. Like Carey Logan’s sculptures.” Armed by his certainty and flattered by his comparison, I barreled forward.