RaveThe Times Literary Supplement (UK)Charting her decade-long relationship with Freud, Self-Portrait is, quite explicitly, an exercise in reversing the subject position: \'By writing about myself in my own words, I have made my life my own story\' ... Writing from different eras intersects in a jumble of thought and memory, leaving the reader sometimes unsure as to whether we are reading the words of a twenty- or near-sixty-year-old ... Paul observes: \'Although I was Lucian’s subject, he wasn’t mine\' ... Self-Portrait illuminates how supremely difficult it is to make an artistic practice work alongside the demands of care-giving and home-making ... Self-Portrait makes clear just how much Freud was influenced and energized by Paul as an artist as well as a lover and subject, but there has been little allowance for others in the story of his genius. Though well it might, Celia Paul’s book does not feel angry. Instead, the author draws on the rare reflective power she exhibits in her art, to communicate what, she found, painting could not.
