Brutally honest but even-handed, Gilot openly describes her often-turbulent life with the volatile genius. Picasso is revealed as brilliant but calculating, a man who despised sentimentality and mostly sought to shock the senses. It is filled with emotional and often surprising disclosures about the man, his work, his thoughts and his contemporaries such as Matisse, Braque, Gertrude Stein and Giacometti, among others. Evocative of the time and full of remarkably detailed commemorations of conversations between Pablo and his famous friends. Gilot provides a brilliant self-portrait of a young woman with enormous talent figuring out who she really wanted to become. She provides a detailed insider's view of the great artist at work and delivers a dynamic understanding of his inner thoughts. A captivating and monumental snapshot of a bygone era that still resonates 57 years after its first publication.

... an invaluable work of art history and a revealing precursor to the literature of #MeToo ... In Gilot's telling, which is without fail warm and empathic, Picasso emerges as domineering, sexist, and borderline abusive ... she is a highly intelligent young artist to whom her former lover's artwork is as intellectually exciting as their relationship was destructive ... Throughout the memoir, Gilot takes control through her artistic intelligence. She describes Picasso's methods and compares him to his contemporaries, filtering their work through her own exacting critical eye. Gilot is exceptionally good at describing art ... But periodically she moves into full lyricism ... Gilot does spend significant time describing Picasso's artistic methods and ideas. This seems not like subordination, but like study. It also underscores the extent to which her attraction to him relied on his art ... The book's intellectual heft is in its art criticism, even as its emotional arc lies in Picasso and Gilot's unequal romance. Only by appreciating both can readers accord Gilot the respect she deserves.

... remarkable ... There’s no way to know, of course, if all this happened as Gilot says it did. (Lake said that she had 'total recall,' a claim that tends to raise rather than allay suspicions.) She has the memoirist’s prerogative—this is how I remember it—and Picasso’s tyranny and brilliance are hardly in dispute. The bigger mystery is Gilot; the self in her self-portrait can be hard to see behind the lacquered irony and reserve ... Her dissent is withering and sarcastic rather than furious; like other women of her generation who pointedly overlooked the bad behavior of their husbands, she is concerned with preserving her own dignity ... Gilot’s memoir shines, now, as a proto-feminist classic, the tale of a young woman who found herself in the thrall of a dazzling master and ended up breaking free. But it is also a love story, and a traditional one. The contradiction is right there in the book.

Life with Picasso is many impressive things, but most certainly it is not a revenge document or a Picasso-kicking or a #MeToo kiss and thrust. Mistaking it for any of those things would be plain wrong. From the first word to the last this is, above all, a love story. Painful, yes. Complex, yes. Doomed, yes. But still a love story ... Gilot writes so well about the opening rounds of her Picasso time. She has an ear for a good anecdote and, as everyone who was anyone in global culture turned up at some point on the doorstep, her impressive powers of recall have a field day with the cast list ... in the conversations with her antique lover about art, remembered in extraordinary detail, that Gilot’s book mines its second seam of brilliance. They are some of the best conversations about 20th-century art you will ever encounter ... the first three-quarters of the book offer a gripping mix of love, aesthetics and hilarious anecdotes. But then suddenly it darkens. Having persuaded Gilot to have children to fulfil herself as a woman, Picasso turns into the monster we have been expecting from the beginning ... But it is another of this book’s many strong points that it is only when the illusions pop for [Gilot], that they also pop for us.

It’s a remarkably fluid and engaging book, doubly so because Gilot, French by birth, wrote in English. And her voice, sure and strong, presents a subtle edge against Picasso’s inconstancy ... Gilot tells the story of this affair in a measured and humorous tone ... The painter’s celebrity provides some of the memoir’s funniest and most bizarre anecdotes ... Gilot describes Picasso’s changeable petulance as something like an overbearing manic depressive child. He’s an art monster in the classic sense. His pettiness makes for entertaining and frustrating reading ... One fascinating aspect of this memoir is the outsider’s view that Gilot brings to mid-century surrealism and the celebrity of modern artists. She gives a refreshing and evenhanded account of some of the personalities that brought high Modernism into the mainstream ... Her conversations with Matisse and Picasso make up some of the best parts of the memoir ... As both witness of and participant in the life of Picasso, Gilot captures a mind in constant conversation, as well as the essence of her partnership with the famous painter. Gilot’s precise descriptions of her experience and observations continue to fascinate.