Karen Karbo

Karen Karbo is an American novelist, non-fiction writer and journalist.

Karbo's three comic novels, Trespassers Welcome Here (1990), The Diamond Lane (1993), and Motherhood Made a Man Out of Me (2001), were each named New York Times Notable Books. Coco Chanel, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Julia Child. Her other non-fiction works are Generation Ex: Tales From The Second Wives Club (2001), The Stuff of Life: A Daughter's Memoir (2004), In Praise of Difficult Women (2018), and Yeah, No. Not Happening (2020). She has also written the three-book Minerva Clark children's mystery series (2005–7).

Karbo has received an Oregon Book Award and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction, among other recognition. She has written essays, articles and reviews for Elle, Esquire, The New York Times, O, Outside, Salon.com, Vogue, and other magazines. New York Times critic Janet Burroway described her books as "praised for their laugh-aloud, zinging, elbow-in-the-side wit," and her magazine work as in the tradition of participatory journalism writers such as George Plimpton or Bob Shacochis.

Fiction works

Novels Karbo's novels often draw on personal experiences—in college and the film industry, and with marriage, mortality and motherhood. Her first, Trespassers Welcome Here (1990, Village Voice Top Ten Book of the Year), tapped into her work in the USC Russian department to explore life in the West for a group of Russian emigres in a university Slavic languages department: a quartet of unrelated teaching assistants dubbed the "Lenin Sisters" and a famed author and teacher. Los Angeles Times critic Judith Freeman wrote that it tackles two "notoriously fickle institutions requiring blind hope to sustain life"—Hollywood and marriage—with astringent humor.

Non-fiction works Like her novels, Karbo's non-fiction works draw on personal experience and phases of life. The New York Times called her first, Generation Ex: Tales From The Second Wives Club (2001), a "smart and ruefully funny examination of divorced life" peppered with solid statistics, anecdotes and hard-earned insight. Publishers Weekly wrote that "Karbo makes ample use of her narrative instinct and canny eye for human foibles," evoking scenes between ex-spouses that achieve "an unerring blend of screwball comedy, tragic drama, feel-good fantasy and stalker flicks." Her The Stuff of Life: A Daughter’s Memoir (2008) was a departure, detailing Karbo's experience caring for her stoic, out-of-state father in his final year, while juggling work, her blended-family responsibilities, and conflicting emotions regarding caregiving, uncommunicative doctors, decline and loss. Reviews described the memoir—a New York Times Notable Book, People Magazine Critic’s Choice, and Oregon Book Award winner—as unembellished, wrenchingly sad and remarkably funny. Intended as neither scholarly nor comprehensive, the series explores iconic women in short, researched volumes written in a humorous, conversational and occasionally rueful tone.

The first book, How to Hepburn (2007), chronicles key points and anecdotes in Katharine Hepburn's life and career, alongside analysis, diverse lists of her habits, pastimes, rule-breaking and opinions (e.g., "A Primer on How to Be a Class Act"), and a quiz scoring a reader's capacity to be a "Hepburnian Stoic." Karbo attracted more notice for The Gospel According to Coco Chanel (2009), which the Los Angeles Times described as a chatty, fun and insightful look at Chanel's self-invention, relationship to work, money, love and glamour, and impact on women’s fashion and modern life. Publishers Weekly wrote, "this intimate, quirky, and sassy essay makes its iconic subject into an accessible, relevant figure with whom readers, particularly women, can identify." Julia Child Rules (2013) parses aspects of Child’s personality and early struggles, finding lessons in her work ethic, passion and "immutable aptitude for being herself ... with self-assuredness and joy."

Later non-fiction works Following her "Kick Ass Women" series, Karbo came out with the bestselling In Praise of Difficult Women (2018), which Los Angeles Review of Books described as a creative mash-up of biographical essay, self-help book and feminist polemic, "snatching a weaponized word out of the trigger-happy hands of the patriarchy."

Karbo's Yeah, No. Not Happening (2020) shares with its predecessor a focus on the exhausting demands of American womanhood, weaving her own story of on-and-off-again dieting and struggles with anxiety into a feminist empowerment guide that advocates self-care and the embrace of imperfection, while railing against "the great female self-improvement bamboozlement."

Karbo moved to Portland in the late 1990s, and over the next decade, completed her third novel and Minerva Clark series while venturing into non-fiction writing and teaching classes and workshops.

Books Non-fiction Yeah, No. Not Happening (2020) In Praise of Difficult Women (2018) Julia Child Rules (2013) How Georgia Became O’Keeffe (2011) The Gospel According to Coco Chanel (2009) The Stuff of Life: A Daughter’s Memoir (2008) How to Hepburn (2007) Generation Ex: Tales From The Second Wives Club (2001)

Novels Motherhood Made a Man Out Of Me (2000) The Diamond Lane (1991) Trespassers Welcome Here (1990)

Children's Minerva Clark Gets a Clue (2005) Minerva Clark Goes To The Dogs (2006) Minerva Clark Gives Up The Ghost (2007)