What I learned from reading Coco Chanel: The Legend and the Life by Justine Picardie.
Those on whom legends are built are their legends, declared Coco Chanel.
Not long before her death, when her face had already become a fixed mass to the world and her myth apparently impenetrable, she was speaking to Claude Delay.
Delay was a young woman at the time, the daughter of a well known french psychiatrist, but is herself now an eminent psychoanalyst and an expert guide to the labyrinth of secrets and lies that that Chanel constructed to conceal the truth of her past.
Not that there is ever a single truth in a life, especially for a woman who built a career on refashioning women's ideas of themselves.
Which may be why Chanel recounted so many different stories about herself, as if in each version, something new might emerge out of her history.
I don't like the family, she told Delay.
You're born in it, not of it.
I don't know anything more terrifying than the family.
And so she circled around and about it, telling and retelling the narrative of her youth, remaking history just as she remade the sleeves of a jacket, unfastening its seams and cutting its threads, and then sewing it back together again.
Childhood.
You speak of it when you're very tired, because it's a time when you had hopes, expectations.
I remember my childhood by heart.
If Chanel's memory did survive intact, she nevertheless obscured her past from others, reshaping its heartaches, smoothing away the rough edges.
But she couldn't keep all the details hidden.
That was an excerpt from the book I'm going to talk to you about today, which is Coco Chanel, the legend and the life.
And it was written by Justine Bacardi.
Okay, so this is my second time reading a biography of Coco Chanel.
There's two primary reasons why I needed to read another one.
In addition to her being one of the most successful entrepreneurs to ever live and maybe creating one of the best, or not, maybe definitely creating one of the best well known brands that has ever existed in human history.
But the primary reason is that the book I covered all the way back on Founders number 64, that was a book that was published right after she died, and I had an original copy.