Essay by Sarah M. Lowe Summary and Analysis

Reading through Kahlo's Diary is an "act of transgression." Her journal was never meant to be seen by the public. It is private and intimate.

The Diary is not an accounting of the self in the context of history like most diaries, but simply Kahlo's "self" trying to understand itself. It is a "journal in-time," a record written by someone just for him or herself. It is a repository for feelings and images and a place for firsthand observations and immediate reactions. Thus the Diary must be "approached with some trepidation" because the artist is not trying to make art.

Kahlo begins the diary in the mid 1940s, when she is thirty-six years old. Her father died a few years earlier and she had divorced and then married Diego Rivera five years earlier...