The only woman in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time and the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange, Mary Kay Ash has a life story that feels like a Barbara Taylor Bradford novel

Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. She marries at sixteen, is a grandmother by thirty-four. Addicted to the praise and prizes of direct selling, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives—hoping this will somehow make her dreams come true.

After a string of failed marriages, she starts her own company when she is forty-five. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. The company she started in a tiny Texas storefront grows into a global phenomenon with 3.5 million reps in over 35 countries. She becomes the most famous saleswoman of the century. Her own name becomes a synonym for second chances and self-invention.

Based on fifteen years of research and hundreds of interviews—including exclusives with her contemporaries—this first-ever biography is a cinematically paced narrative full of fabulous characters, incredible true stories, and Mary Kay’s own dry wit. More than that, Selling Opportunity, which covers the heyday of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory, is also the story of a peculiarly American business and a mid-century mindset that ennobled extreme self-reliance, sticking to your guns, and blind faith in the American dream.