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eugeniekildine's review
emotional
informative
inspiring
fast-paced
1.75
Content Warnings
Moderate: Blood, Chronic illness, Cursing, Infertility, Abortion, Addiction, Alcoholism, Child death, Death, Medical trauma, Death of parent, Drug abuse, Infidelity, and Miscarriage
Minor: Suicide
ceallaighsbooks's review
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
informative
sad
medium-paced
5.0
“Who would say that spots live and help one live?! Ink, blood smell. I do not know what ink I would use that would want to leave its track in such forms. I respect its wishes and I will do what I can to flee from myself worlds, Inked worlds—land free and mine. Far away suns that call me because I form a part of their nucleus. Foolishness… What would I do without the absurd and the fleeting?” — Frida Kahlo, as quoted in Hayden Herrera’s Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
TITLE—Frida: A Biography of Frida Kahlo
AUTHOR—Hayden Herrera (née Philips)
PUBLISHED—1983
GENRE—biography; nonfiction
MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—the Life of Frida Kahlo; art; 20th c. Mexican history & culture
WRITING STYLE—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
CHARACTERization—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
PLOT(or how the “story” of Frida’s life was told, I guess)—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
BONUS ELEMENT/S—How fucking relatable Frida was as a person! Her story is heartbreaking because of how REAL she was, how honestly and fiercely she insisted on living in spite of her circumstances.
PHILOSOPHY—⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Frida Kahlo’s art expresses though painting what my favorite books express through prose. Her work is part of that seemingly undefinable genre in which all the gorey folkloric magical surreal painful details are given the most attention—sometimes mournful, sometimes, however, even adoring. They are also all depictions of self-discovery and self-revelation, an expression of experiences and emotions that sometimes seem to defy articulation. Even her writing in her letters and diaries captures some of that feeling that I love most in my favorite works of literature. I wish she’d written more!
I have always been fascinated by Frida’s art but I’ve never really known much about who she was as a person except that she was bisexual. Reading Herrera’s (somewhat problematic, heteronormative) biography revealed (imo) that she was probably also genderfluid to some degree as well. I struggled a lot with some of the assumptions I felt Herrera made regarding these aspects of Frida’s person (she even spends like a solid couple of pages trying to “justify” Frida’s queerness which… yikes…) but I did like that Herrera included a TON of transcriptions of Frida’s own letters and diary entries so that we got enough of Frida’s own words alongside Herrera’s interpretations.
As an art historian, Herrera certainly projected a lot of her own perspective and education on her interpretations of Frida’s paintings but for the most part I think her takes were very insightful although of course there were some things I think she got wrong but obviously this is all very subjective. The amount of research Herrera did, including all of the people who knew Frida personally that she found to interview was really impressive.
I love everything about Frida—her unapologetic personality, her black and raunchy humor, her style, her alegría—and found so much of her story inspiring and relevant to my own life experience (in spite of the vast differences between our lives, obviously). Her passion for love, life, beauty, and happiness in a world that had brought her SO much—like an unthinkable amount—of pain, is astounding, wonderful, and inspiring.
“I am not sick,” she says. “I am broken. But I am happy to be alive as long as I can paint.”
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
TW // trauma, chronic pain, suicidal thoughts, infidelity, abortion, antisemitism, miscarriage, medical content, chronic illness, alcoholism, drug use/abuse, suicide attempts, toxic relationships, death
Further Reading—
- The Diary of Frida Kahlo, with commentaries by Sarah M. Lowe—I read this immediately after finishing the biography and you absolutely have to read these together. They should be sold as a set. 😁❤️
- I don’t read many art books or know a lot about artists similar to Frida but these authors works remind me a lot of her paintings and her life:
- Laura Esquivel
- Gabriel Garcia Marquez
- Helen Oyeyemi
- Shirley Jackson
Content Warnings
Graphic: Abortion, Addiction, Alcoholism, Blood, Body horror, Car accident, Chronic illness, Death, Drug abuse, Drug use, Gore, Grief, Infertility, Infidelity, Medical content, Medical trauma, Miscarriage, Suicidal thoughts, Suicide attempt, Terminal illness, and Toxic relationship
shinysarah28's review against another edition
slow-paced
4.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Ableism, Chronic illness, and Medical trauma
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