The Gospel According to Coco Chanel: Life Lessons from the World's Most Elegant Woman

Delving into the extraordinary life of renowned French fashion designer Coco Chanel, Karen Karbo has written a new kind of self-help book, exploring Chanel's philosophy on a range of universal themes―from style to passion, from money and success to femininity and living life on your own terms.

Karen Karbo is a novelist, journalist, and witty, no-nonsense social commentator, and is the author of How to Hepburn: Lessons on Living from Kate the Great, a biography-cum-guidebook the Philadelphia Inquirer called “an exuberant celebration of a great original.” Karbo is also the author of Minerva Clark Gives Up the Ghost, the third installment in a trilogy about a seventh-grade girl detective who has a peculiar gift: self-confidence. Karbo's debut novel, Trespassers Welcome Here, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and all three of her novels have been named New York Times notable books. The Stuff of Life, her memoir about her father, was a People Magazine Critic's Pick and winner of the Oregon Book Award. Her work essays, reviews, and articles can be found in Outside, Elle, Vogue, Esquire, Redbook, More, Self, Entertainment Weekly, the New Republic, the Oregonian, and the New York Times.

Karbo also hails from a family of designers. Her grandmother, Luna of California, was a well-known designer of couture in Los Angeles in the 50s, and her father was an industrial designer who in 1942 designed the hood ornament for the Lincoln Continental, still in use today. She lives in Portland, Oregon.