Colombian painter Emma Reyes lived a cosmopolitan life. She died in France in 2003 in her eighties, having also lived in Italy, Israel, the United States, and Mexico. She worked with Diego Rivera. She exchanged letters with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. She enjoyed an intellectual, glamorous life.
So her posthumously published memoir, "The Book of Emma Reyes, " recounting her bleak childhood astonished me. No one at any point nurtured ambitions in Reyes for a life of art and travel. She and her sister, the illegitimate daughters of a careless and unloving mother, struggled in poverty in a strict Catholic country. Every time the girls find a respite, happiness is snatched away. The brief anecdotes, which could have been enervating, are told with such clarity and humor that you read it with joy and finish it admiring the bold, unbreakable girl and the powerful woman she grew to be.
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