Herrera published this in 1983, when Kahlo was still mostly filed as Diego Rivera’s wife, and it’s the book that ended that. She goes back to the blue house in Coyoacán where Frida was born, the polio at six, and the streetcar that hit her bus at eighteen and put a handrail through her hip. Frida started painting flat on her back with a mirror rigged over the bed, which is how the self-portraits began — she was the model who was always available. Then Rivera, twice married and twice unfaithful, the surgeries that never stopped, the miscarriages, Trotsky. Herrera reads every canvas against what was happening the month it was made, and the paintings stop looking like symbolism and start looking like reporting.