I was drawn to Frida first by her paintings, how unequivocal and fierce and ruthless and original.  Then the biographical details of her life resonated for me. She was a woman ahead of her time or perhaps any time. She was an artist. She was a revolutionary. She was a drug addict. She was bisexual. She was global, in her outlook and in her opportunities.  In fact, Frida K’s life was an encapsulated version of modernity. The issues of her life are still controversial and unresolved fifty years after her death. Her wounds still burn.

I decided to write about Frida because I identified with her, as an artist, as a wounded woman. My activist involvement during the 60’s and my life in Los Angeles, which was a literary frontier region as much as Mexico City was in the 1940’s, informed my perspective. I saw myself as an outlaw, a woman who defied the consensual realities. 50 years later, to be a woman and write, to be a woman married to her art, this is still a revolutionary act. I was drawn in by her face, which contained thousands of stories. I wanted to translate her into a recognizable fiction.

My research was largely emotional, almost tactile. I read the biographies, but in passing. Most of my research was immersing myself in her paintings and in the fantastic photographs taken of her by Weston and Mondotti. Frida in black and white is an epic. I wanted to find the thoughts behind the pose, the voice you cannot hear.

A fictionalized work has nothing to do with a standard biography.  It’s a separate entity entirely. In fiction, one looks for the emotional truth. Facts are unimportant. Facts can be a catalyst. But the writer is not bound or limited by actual biography. My Frida is not a subject. She’s a character.

I began with the obvious boundaries of the biographically correct Frida. But I began to take liberties with the so-called facts. Eventually, I discarded the facts entirely when the fictional truth was more compelling. Frida’s biographically known life is too exotic, too strange, too much an opera to play on the page. She requires modulation, condensing, the imposition of coherence and periods of silence. I had to restrain Frida. I had to tame and orchestrate her. The rules of fiction applied.

I would hope my readers make of Frida their private literary Rorschach test. A member of a book club told me that in discussion, the dozen women found they each had a separate Frida. I would hope that my Frida would be an individual and distinct world for each reader. I deliberately wrote the book with ambiguities, with frontier regions where there is no safe or convenient travel. All the roads are filled with dust and malaria and bandits. Some lives are compendiums of ghastly accident and brutal irony. Some stories are not easy reads.

I would like readers to move toward the dark, toward the fire, the burn. I want to give my readers permission to feel uncertain, to feel uncomfortable, unanchored. Frida is an adventure. She is defined by the intelligence and daring and experience of the reader. To read and respond in a group is a terrific intimacy. I want fearless readers.

I want frightened readers. Reading is not a passive act. It’s more like an act of passion, of trespass, of the high trapeze. I would hope my books cause delirium and nightmares. To know Frida is to ask fundamental questions about our secret latitudes, what it is to be women, what breaks our spirit and how we transcend.

I do not have a favorite painting. I think Frida’s work is like mine in the sense that one doesn’t have specific favorites. Rather, one looks, one shudders, one hopes to simply survive. - Kate Braverman, 2003.