In 'Emma Reyes,' Life Through A Child's Clear Eyes
As an adult, the Colombian painter Emma Reyes lived in Paris and befriended Frida Kahlo. But in a series of autobiographical letters, she describes a childhood of grinding misery and poverty.
Lily Meyer works at Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.
It's very tempting to believe that is not a memoir. Not a conventional memoir, at least. It's easy to see it as a found document, a work of accidental and miraculous genius. That's how it's presented, and, to be fair, more or less how it was conceived. is a series of letters that the Colombian painter Emma Reyes wrote to the historian and critic Germán Arciénagas, at his request. Apparently she was an exceptional storyteller, and
