by Karen Karbo
In Praise of DIFFICULT WOMEN
“In 29 takes, Karen Karbo catalogs the ways in which a woman rankles: She can be independent, exacting, impatient, persistent, opinionated, angry, ambitious, confident, or just plain visible. You’ll need two copies!”
—STACY SCHIFF, best-selling author of The Witches
“Part biography, part inspiration, all parts fascinating, In Praise of Difficult Women is a wise and hilarious reminder of the importance of being a pain in the ass. Keep it by your bedside.”
—MEGHAN DAUM, best-selling author of The Unspeakable
“Difficult seems absolutely delightful in these absorbing, inspiring, and often surprising portraits that raise important questions about femininity and culture, power and bravery. Though Karbo masterfully covers a wide range of exceptional women, what unites them is how they make ‘difficult’ a quality not to avoid—but to aspire to with gusto.”
—LORI GOTTLIEB, best-selling author of Marry Him
“Give me difficult women or give me death! In this marvelous book, Karen Karbo illuminates the paths of women who refused to shut up, sit down, hold still, behave, or smile on anyone’s terms but their own. A perfect manifesto as to why now is the time to get loud, unflinching, and brazen, exactly as we are.”
—LIDIA YUKNAVITCH, author of The Misfit’s Manifesto
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This book is dedicated to Fiona and Stephanie,
and to daughters everywhere:
Be difficult.
“Whatever you choose, however many roads you travel, I hope that you choose not to be a lady. I hope you will find some way to break the rules and make a little trouble out there. And I also hope that you will choose to make some of that trouble on behalf of women.”
—NORA EPHRON,
Wellesley Commencement Speech, 1996
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Foreword by Cheryl Strayed
Introduction
J. K. Rowling
Elizabeth Taylor
Gloria Steinem
Amy Poehler
Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Josephine Baker
Rachel Maddow
Coco Chanel
Martha Gellhorn
Shonda Rhimes
Eva Perón
Helen Gurley Brown
Edie Sedgwick
Angela Merkel
Billie Jean King
Jane Goodall
Vita Sackville-West
Elizabeth Warren
Margaret Cho
Amelia Earhart
Frida Kahlo
Nora Ephron
Diana Vreeland
Kay Thompson
Laverne Cox
Hillary Rodham Clinton
Janis Joplin
Lena Dunham
Carrie Fisher
Acknowledgments
Sources
About the Author
Reading Guide
FOREWORD
THE FIRST DIFFICULT WOMAN I KNEW was named Myrtle. Elderly and white haired, single and childless, she lived next door to my family when I was five. A spinster, my father told me one day, his tone so disparaging it sparked my interest. She thinks she can do whatever she wants to do, he said. Even at five, I knew this to be in violation of a cardinal rule in the unwritten but widely known rule book of what it means to be female.
Intrigued, I studied Myrtle from afar, deeply curious about what a woman who thought she could do whatever she wanted to do might actually do. But my findings were a disappointment. Doing whatever she wanted to do, at least in this particular case, turned out to be nothing more than to play her piano in the early evenings—the melodic thunder of it spilling from her windows into our yard, where I did gymnastics with my sister while pretending not to be a spy. I don’t recall a single conversation with Myrtle, and yet the fact of her existence stuck to me like a burr. Perhaps because even all those years ago, I knew that I, too, wanted to be the kind of woman who did what she wanted to do.
In my 20s, I named my truck after Myrtle. I’m not generally one to assign human qualities to automobiles, but this truck was different, and the name fit. A 1979 Chevy LUV pickup, Myrtle was more companion than vehicle, more confidante than mass of metal and machinery. In her I could go anywhere, and did. From New York to Alabama to Minnesota to Wyoming to Arizona to California to Oregon and points in between, that truck was my home away from home on countless weeks-long, low-budget road trips. I slept alone amid the vast darkness of national forests on a futon I’d laid out in the truck’s long bed, cooking dinner solo in small-town parks on a camp stove propped on the tailgate. In Myrtle’s rusted body—onto which I’d plastered bumper stickers that said things like Feminism Is the Radical Notion That Women Are People and Question Authority and Well-Behaved Women Seldom Make History—I had my first taste of what it felt like to do what the original Myrtle had done. I too had defied one of the cardinal rules in the unwritten but widely known rule book of what it means to be female: Into the wildest places, I’d ventured alone.
I thought of those two Myrtles and the two younger versions of myself as I read this book, which is chock-full of people who remind us, by the example of their lives, that rules are powerful only if we obey them. These 29 fascinating, moving, entertaining, and inspiring essays explore the many facets of what it means to be female and “difficult”—which is really another way of saying female and “brave enough to express the full range of one’s humanity.” Instead of carrying out the wishes of others, the accomplished women in these pages did what they wanted to do, the way they wanted to do it. Without apology, they decided to be ambitious and bold, adventurous and emotional, brainy and defiant, incorrigible and outlandish, determined and badass.
They said no in a world that expects women to say yes, and yes in a world that doesn’t even bother to ask them the question.
Their stories matter because they teach us how to live, much in the same way that old, outdated-from-the-start rule book of what it means to be female tried to do. Each story offers us another version, another path, another way of seeing women and being one.
They’re also a lot of fun to read. Each chapter felt to me like I finally had the goods on the mysteriou
s woman who lived next door. We are led to vividly imagine the young Jane Goodall doing her first research while camping in the central African bush with her mother, as well as the unflinching pain that informed Frida Kahlo’s most exquisite paintings. We contemplate Laverne Cox’s undaunted courage as a trans woman and the nerve it took for Lena Dunham to flaunt what most perceive as imperfection. We delve into the essence of Elizabeth Warren’s persistence and Billie Jean King’s competitive drive and Eva Perón’s fanaticism, among so much more.
And, through these perceptive and personal portraits, we get a portrait of Karen Karbo herself. I happen to know she’s also a woman who threw out the rule book of what it means to be female. She replaced it with this book instead.
—Cheryl Strayed
Author of Wild and Tiny Beautiful Things
INTRODUCTION
THE BOOK YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS is about women who insisted on being difficult.
A difficult woman, as I define her, is a person who believes her needs, passions, and goals are at least as important as those of everyone around her. In many cases, she doesn’t even believe they’re more important—many women in this book were devoted, loving wives and mothers—but simply as important. A difficult woman is also a woman who doesn’t believe the expectations of the culture in which she lives are more important than what she knows to be true about herself. She is a woman who accepts that sometimes the cost of being fully human is upsetting people.
A difficult woman isn’t a bitch, although on occasion she might be. She isn’t cruel or selfish or mean—although, again, on occasion she might be. Just like anyone (by which I mean men), she has bad days, she makes mistakes, she loses her temper. A difficult woman is a woman who insists on inhabiting the full range of her humanity.
Difficult women tend not to be ladies-in-waiting. Waiting for love, waiting for someone to notice their excellent job performance, waiting for the kids to go to bed, or off to school, waiting until they lose weight and fit into their skinny jeans. Instead, they are driven by their internal engines. They make other people wait. It’s immaterial whether these others worry about her, grow impatient with her, find her frustrating, or call her names. Difficult women may not enjoy causing a stir (though most seem to), and sometimes their feelings get hurt, but the bumps along the way fail to deter them from their mission.
The 29 iconic women included in this book have inspired me over the years, and to this moment. Obviously, there are many more difficult women worthy of inclusion in these pages. But these were the ones who spoke to me.
My mother died when I was 17, my father quickly remarried, and I was more or less on my own. Throughout college, I ministered to my loneliness with biographies of great women. Into my life came Martha Gellhorn, Coco Chanel, Josephine Baker. They were women of a long-ago era, but they felt alive to me: singular, bold, different, difficult. Gloria Steinem, Jane Goodall, and Nora Ephron were in my personal pantheon of living legends I adored; now, I watch the uber-difficult Margaret Cho, Rachel Maddow, and Lena Dunham walking their talk, generating outrage (and tweets) all along the way.
As I read and wrote, I was a little delirious to discover the many ways in which women can be difficult.
We can be good-natured and competitive (Billie Jean King); sarcastic and vulnerable (Carrie Fisher); quiet, well behaved, and braver than most men (Amelia Earhart); completely unapologetic about taking everything that is our due (Shonda Rhimes); zany and so off-the-charts talented people don’t know what to make of us (Kay Thompson); ambitious beyond measure (Hillary Clinton).
They come from every background and upbringing, my difficult women. Wealthy, but neglected (Vita Sackville-West); of modest means, but rich in love and attachment (Elizabeth Warren); and straight-up middle-class (Janis Joplin). Many of these women had stable early childhoods, but if their fathers left or died, the family descended into poverty (Helen Gurley Brown, Eva Perón, Amelia Earhart). Some were conventionally pretty (Elizabeth Taylor, Gloria Steinem), some were what the French call jolie laide (Diana Vreeland, Frida Kahlo).
But all of them have embraced their messy, interesting lives. All serve as an inspiration for more accommodating women, who like me long to be braver, bolder, more courageous, more outspoken, more willing to upset the status quo.
I love these women because they encourage me to own my true nature. They teach me that it’s perfectly okay not to go along to get along. They show by example that we shouldn’t shy away from stating our opinions. Their lives were and are imperfect. They suffered. They made mistakes. But they rarely betrayed their essential natures to keep the peace. They saw (and see) no margin in making sure no one around them is inconvenienced.
These difficult women give us permission to occupy space in our worlds, to say what we think, and to stand our ground. They give us permission to be ambitious, passionate, curmudgeonly, outspoken, persistent, sassy, and angry. They tell us, by their words and deeds, that it’s all right to occupy our humanity.
I hope you will come to revere them—and be inspired by them—as I have.
CHAPTER 1
J. K. ROWLING
Feisty
GIVEN HER MONUMENTAL LITERARY SUCCESS, happy marriage to a loving Scottish doctor, three beautiful children, posh residences scattered around the UK, blond English rose beauty, and ability to rock dangly earrings, there is no reason on Earth for J. K. Rowling to be difficult. And yet she is. Tetchy on Twitter, out and proud about her progressive politics, Jo (as she calls herself) isn’t interested in remaining imprisoned by her role as creator of one of the most beloved fictional universes in literary history. Instead, she stays in the fray, enjoys stirring things up.
Jo has always been scrappy, so either old habits die hard or she sees no reason to stop now. Her own origin story has become as well known as Harry Potter’s. She grew up in middle-class English villages—the first outside Bristol, the next farther west in the Forest of Dean.*1 Her father, Peter, was a Rolls Royce aircraft engine mechanic; her mother, Anne, a science technician in the chemistry department at Jo and her younger sister’s high school. Anne was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis when Jo was 15, which put an abrupt end to the luxury of being a bookish, sheltered child. She became the girl with heavy eyeliner, binge-reading Tolkien while The Smiths pumped through her headphones.
In 1982, Jo applied to Oxford, didn’t get in, and wound up studying French and classics at Exeter. In 1986, after graduation, she worked for Amnesty International. Four years later, while sitting on a delayed train en route to London, she got the idea for a book about a boy wizard who takes a magical train to his magical boarding school. She started writing, but when her mother died, she lost her momentum.
It was 1991. Jo was 25 and suddenly lost. On a whim she moved to Porto, Portugal, where she met and married journalist Jorge Arantes. A daughter, Jessica, was born in 1993—but the marriage didn’t last, and Jo soon found herself back in England with an infant, three chapters of her wizard book, and not much else. “I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless…By every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew,” she confessed.
Hoping to make a new start, Jo moved to Scotland at the end of 1993. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was written in Edinburgh cafés while she lived hand to mouth and cared for her baby. After she was finished, the manuscript was rejected a dozen times. People apparently thought the boarding school trope had been played out, even if it was a wizard boarding school that featured a partially decapitated ghost named Nearly Headless Nick.
Then, an editor at Bloomsbury, aka the Smartest Man in Publishing, bought the manuscript for $2,250. Pretty much every superlative came to pass. The seven Harry Potter books became the best-selling literary series in history. The last four of the seven volumes hold records for the fastest sales. They’ve been published in 73 languages (including Latin and ancient Greek, just f
or kicks), and have sold 450 million copies, give or take.
The books begat the movies, which begat the theme park attractions. More than 600,000 pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction have been produced, and about a hundred more pieces have been posted online since I began writing this sentence. A two-part West End stage play, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, opened in 2016. It takes place 19 years in the future after Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the seventh book in the series. In the sequel, Harry has become an employee at the Ministry of Magic. I haven’t seen the play, but I’m a bit disheartened to think that after his epic childhood and teen years, Harry grew up to become, essentially, a civil servant.
But wait, there’s more. In 2001 Jo expanded her Potter oeuvre to include “textbooks” from Hogwarts—Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (writing as the fictitious magizoologist Newt Scamander)—and in 2012 published her first adult novel, The Casual Vacancy. She also writes the Cormoran Strike crime series, under the pen name Robert Galbraith (described by the publisher as, “a former plainclothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry”). All this has made Jo literally richer than the Queen of England, and people have become obsessed with her financial status, before and after the Potter books. In 2016, the New York Times offered an in-depth accounting, but the takeaway is:
Then, not a pot to piss in.
Now, billions or millions, depending on whether you’re counting the vast sums she’s given away to charity.
ROWLING FINISHED THE FINAL POTTER installment in 2007—and now that she’s off the leash, she’s known for being “thin-skinned.” These days “thin-skinned” is the insult du jour—but long before politicians were calling each other thin-skinned and pundits who disagreed were calling each other thin-skinned, Jo was smacked with the label. In 2007, Time magazine described her as “a woman of high energy and a short fuse.” In 2012, the New Yorker weighed in with, “She has a reputation for being likable, but shy and thin-skinned.”