Between Two Kingdoms: A Memoir of a Life Interrupted

by Suleika Jaouad

It’s a funny thing, coming home. Everything smells the same, looks the same, feels the same, but you are different; the contrast between who you were when you left and who you are now is heightened against the backdrop of old haunts.

Kahlo’s surgeries and convalescences, infatuations and heartbreaks, lived on in her paintings after she died, and she eventually gained a near-mythical status as a patron saint of misfits and sufferers. Could these masterpieces ever have been painted by someone who was well? I wondered. Could they have been created by someone who hadn’t been forced to confront the terrible fragility of the human body? I wasn’t sure.