The most courageous act . . .

Coco Chanel on speaking up. (The Commonplace Book Project.)

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.” — Coco Chanel, as quoted in Believing in Ourselves by Armand Eisen

Chanel №5 was my grandmother’s signature scent. She also wore red Chanel lipstick she applied meticulously with a lipstick brush, dipping it into the gold tube.

My grandmother was classy. She was artistic and beautiful and if she was rich, I am positive she would have worn Coco Chanel clothes. Mid-century, she embodied the Chanel woman, perfectly.

I’ve had a fascination with mid-century everything for as long as I can remember. I’ve owned a vintage clothing store. Coco Chanel has always been an icon for me. My idea of ‘together.’

So, I thought — I’ll use a Coco Chanel quote today. Because wasn’t she elegant? And wasn’t she secretly the kind of woman I’ve always wanted to be? And she reminds me so much of my grandmother.

And I love the words quoted above. It does take an extreme amount of brave to think for yourself. Aloud.

But then, I do what I do for this series.

I looked a little deeper. And seriously, it didn’t take much looking to get to the idea that Coco Chanel was an anti-semite and a Nazi operative.

It’s right there on her Wikipedia page, for God’s sake.

And here, in this essay in The New Yorker.

It has long been known that Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel — the legendary French designer whose fashion empire bears her name — was, during the Second World War, the lover of a Nazi officer named Hans Günther von Dincklage. But in Sleeping with the Enemy: Coco Chanel’s Secret War, the veteran journalist and investigative reporter Hal Vaughan offers convincing evidence that she was also a Nazi intelligence operative and an incorrigible anti-Semite.

Which lead to Hans Gunther von Dincklage’s book.

And THEN. Within an hour of this news, my daughter Adrienne called me. (You can read her writing An Abundance of Quotes.) We spent our whole Christmas visit talking about The Mists of Avalon and how excited she was to read it when she got home and how much it meant to me when I first read it as a teenager.

Turns out that in 2014 Marion Zimmer Bradley was accused of molesting and raping her daughter, Moira Greyland, and multiple other children. An accusation, by the way, that is not buried. It’s right there on Bradley’s Wikipedia page.

And I’m just . . . what in the actual hell is happening tonight? It feels like my whole world has been turned upside down and the Universe is shaking me for milk money.

Neither of these revelations are new.

You probably already knew one or the other of them. Or both. But I didn’t. I mean, not even on the edges of my perception. I mean, seriously. Until this evening, it had never occurred to me that either of these women was anything other than the creators of art that made a difference in my life.

So it’s left me asking philosophical questions tonight. About the human inclination to idolize the art and ignore the artist almost completely. About whether I’m allowed to still love The Mists of Avalon or whether I can still get a happy grandma vibe from Chanel No5.

Can a book that brought so many young women to feminism still have value, once we know how deeply flawed it’s author is?

Or how about the fact that in one of the first times Moira Greyland spoke out, she said:

Due to my long experience with the BSDM community (bondage/discipline, Sado-Masochism) it is my belief that homosexuality is a matter of IMPRINTING, in the same way that BDSM fantasies are. To the BDSM’er, continued practice of the fantasy is sexually exciting. To the gay person, naturally, the same. However, from what I have seen, neither one creates healing. My mother became a lesbian because she was raped by her father. My father was molested by a priest–and regarded it as being the only love he had ever experienced. There are a vanishingly few people who are exclusively gay, but far more who have relationships with people of BOTH genders, as my parents and other relatives did.

I’d love your thoughts on all of this in the comments. Because honestly, I’m reeling. I think maybe this all ties right back into the quote that started this whole thing.

Here’s my secret weapon for sticking with whatever your thing is.

Shaunta Grimes is a writer and teacher. She is an out-of-place Nevadan living in Northwestern PA with her husband, three superstar kids, two dementia patients, a good friend, Alfred the cat, and a yellow rescue dog named Maybelline Scout. She’s on Twitter @shauntagrimes and is the author of Viral Nation and Rebel Nation and the upcoming novel The Astonishing Maybe. She is the original Ninja Writer.