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In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons From 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules
By
Published: Feb 26, 2018
Category:
Biography
I am a longtime fan of Karen Karbo’s books. I’ve praised How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living and The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World’s Most Elegant Woman and Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life. So it was with considerable curiosity that I opened “In Praise of Difficult Women: Life Lessons From 29 Heroines Who Dared to Break the Rules.”
Karbo defines a “difficult” woman as “a person who believes her needs, passions, and goals are at least as important as those of everyone around her.” This is a fairly low bar. It assumes that the historical oppression of women continues as a general phenomenon pretty much to this day and that any woman slightly more conscious than a Stepford Wife is on her way — insert applause here — to “difficult” status. As a result, we get profiles of Gold Medal difficult women: Gloria Steinem, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Vita Sackville-West, Coco Chanel, Nora Ephron and Frida Kahlo. As a man, I’m no longer permitted to have an opinion on any area of life that involves women, but may I respectfully ask: Edie Sedgwick? Margaret Cho? Lena Dunham?
As it happens, I have profiled three of Karbo’s “difficult” women: Diana Vreeland, Nora Ephron, and Helen Gurley Brown. These were long pieces, requiring exhaustive interviewing and, because they appeared in New York Magazine, a sophisticated point-of-view.
I’m pleased to report that in many fewer words and, as far as can tell, absolutely no interviewing, Karbo writes completely credible profiles. (I think she was wrong about Nora Ephron — a terrific journalist who, in her later pieces, consistently wrote beneath her talent — but then I had observed Ephron close-up for decades and Karbo met her once, for 30 seconds.) And I think I know who these profiles are written for: young readers. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
It makes me feel old and cranky to be annoyed, in Chapter 2, by the news that Elizabeth Taylor had husbands who “rocked her world.” And “that was not how Elizabeth Taylor rolled.” And Elizabeth Warren — she’s “kicking ass and taking names.” At the end of the profile of Warhol Superstar Edie Sedgwick, Karbo asks: “Can’t we all be a little more like this? Sleeping in, eating something whenever, moving around when our bodies demand it, showing up for our appointments in whatever we feel like wearing?” I knew Edie slightly, and I think it’s fair to say she was so fucked up — by drugs, fame, bad associations — that she might as well have had DOOMED tattooed on her forehead. I mean, she took a pill and died. At 28. If she was difficult in a good way, should we really be so judgmental about the Manson girls?
But these are picky criticisms. From the casually kid-friendly language, I sense that the intended reader of this book is a young woman living far from the bright lights of the city. She reads the news online, but she’s mostly on Instagram. She is only recently “woke.” Thanks to the resurgence of the women’s movement, her dreams are getting bigger by the day. Someone is going to give her this book as a graduation present — I’m thinking she’s 18, just finishing high school — and, years from now, when she looks back, she’s going to say this is one of the books that inspired her and changed her life. Which makes this book completely “lit.”
