Joy from "Joy's Book Blog" talks about Kick Ass Women!

When Wesley announced All Lady July, I immediately thought about my favorite lady writing about ladies -- Karen Karbo and her Kick Ass Women series:

• How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great
• The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons From the World’s Most Elegant Woman
• How Georgia Became O’Keeffe: Lessons on the Art of Living
• Julia Child Rules: Lessons on Savoring Life

In these books, I love the way biography weaves with memoir and interlaces with self-help. The experience feels new and modern and, yet, builds on the essays of Montaigne and the journaling of the American Transcendentalists. The lives of all four of these ladies provide lessons to modern women on how to live well and long. Karbo's Kick Ass Women books are attractive and small, quick to read, but the thoughts they inspire linger. Two of these women spent many years in Paris and it shaped who they are and how we think of them. The influence of Coco Chanel still lurks in your closet and mine and the ghost of Julia Child lives on in our kitchens. Through them, we get the spirit of Paris in fashion and food, but pared to the essence to fit our modern lives. Hepburn and O'Keeffe are associated with other places, Hollywood and the American Southwest, but it's not so hard to find Paris connections. Katharine Hepburn met and then played Coco Chanel in the Broadway musical, Coco, in 1969 and 1970, going on tour in 1971 right after Chanel's death. It's easy to imagine Hepburn wearing Chanel. Last year, during my first trip to France, I saw one of Alfred Stieglitz's nude portraits of O'Keeffe in Paris at the Musée d'Orsay, in an exhibit trying to tease out when the photographic nude is art and when it's porn. The French, I gathered, draw that line in a different place than we prudish Americans. O'Keeffe went to Paris, for the first time, at age 62, as one of several late-life adventures. In "How Georgia Became O'Keeffe," the third book in the series, Karen Karbo draws from the lives of Hepburn, Chanel, and O'Keeffe a lesson about how to live an adventurous life well into old age:

Like O’Keeffe, they were skinny, busy, and irritated until they declined a bit, then died. They were active, didn’t eat a lot, and followed their interests. They never let anyone tell them what to do. They were always a bit pissed-off. I can only assume that this is the real recipe for longevity.

That, I think, might be the best secret revealed in the Kick Ass Women series. Thanks, Wesley, for giving me this space to talk about a favorite lady author on a special day for France.

Joy, thanks so much for guest posting today! These books sound like great reads!