Failure™ Magazine

The Marvelous Hairy Girls

The Gonzales sisters were one in a billion—all three of them.

Written by Jason Zasky   Filed under Science & Technology

In addition, both physicians had artists draw the children; Platter’s drawing is lost, but Aldrovandi’s was later included in a book of “monsters,” along with people and animals that had birth defects, strange creatures that really exist (like narwhals), and creatures believed to exist somewhere in the world. Nobles interested in oddities and the exotic had copies made of various portraits of the family, and the pictures ended up on castle walls or in the “cabinets of curiosities” natural scientists were assembling—the roots of today’s museums.

How would a young girl with this condition fare in the world today?
While I was writing the book, a young girl in Thailand with hypertrichosis, Supatra Sasuphan, was being featured in news stories. She seems to have a perfectly normal life—going to school and playing with her friends. So the actual treatment of children with this ailment is better than that imagined in recent fictional accounts, which include an episode of CSI and the 2006 movie Fur, about the legendary photographer Diane Arbus.

What would you like readers to take away from “The Marvelous Hairy Girls”?
I’d like them to gain a sense of the lives of the girls and the times in which they lived: What went through people’s minds when they saw them—did they think about hairy female saints (about which there were many stories), about werewolves, or about pets? Also, how did people fit them in to their understanding of the world? Why would an attractive young woman marry Petrus, and why would a man marry Maddalena? I hope readers find that the way people reacted was both different from today and yet oddly familiar.

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