A diary asserts that yes, the trivia of a life do matter, however muddled and solipsistic those scattered facts and feelings emerge from one intensely personal pen. And to review is to assume, at least for a moment, that the work speaks the truth. Assume as much of me.

When I was sixteen I had the dumb luck of staying in a backwater Italian port on the day of its annual homage to the Virgin Mary. The town marched her statue from the saint's cathedral niche to the marina. Then she, her fishermen retainers, the extremely devout, and the too-stupid-to-understand-"please get out of my boat"-in-Italian motored across the lagoon to the island chapel of Barbana. That it was pouring mercilessly, and that I wished only and unceasingly for my camera (forbidden on the island), speaks perhaps to the modern reflex of self-documentation that Frida and I will come to later.

So I have no "proof," and middling confidence, that the following is true, but offer this as the wonderland-truth of diaries: when I stepped inside the Barbana chapel, I may have seen a hundred Frida Kahlo paintings. Not literally, of course, and yet every wall was encrusted with scores of paintings matching perfectly the savage color, unvarnished humanity, and bold fantasy of her work.

The pictures were ex-votos, the usually amateur and naïve visual depictions of boons requested and miracles granted by the Virgin's intercession. The age-old folk icons appear throughout Mediterranean Christendom and its colonies, from Barbana to Mexico. In one, a man appeared caught on a giant wave, his arms and legs distended like an insect trying to climb from a glass jar. Another showed a woman in bed, a doctor at her side and a saint in blazing indigo hovering above. More cryptic were the apparent self-portraits, faces smiling or weeping with no context or clues but for captions like "thank you" or "misericordia." The Diary invokes the same eerie cosmology—why does a drawing of a headless nude with a prosthetic leg say "the pigeon made mistakes"? A painting of "me and Diego" actually contains four figures. Who are the others? Ghosts? Alter egos? Lovers? Both bodies of work, the ex-votos of Barbana and the oeuvre of Kahlo, pull off the astonishing feat of at once exposing the viscera of the human psyche while preserving their secrecy.

Frida was no Christian. Nor would she have been at home on Barbana, east of the Atlantic. Even today most of her work still dwells in the New World. The Old made meager welcome—for her father, estranged from his native Germany, for her sometime-lover Leon Trotsky, and for her canvases that languished in French customs for weeks before a hasty show in Paris. Its artists, moreover, were in her eyes "coocoo lunatic sons of bitches." Yet there she was, or at least that essence of Frida-ness that occasionally surfaces in human expression to evoke bafflement and mystic terror in its viewers.

In the recently republished Diary of Frida Kahlo, Carlos Fuentes writes a lengthy and lyrical essay that shows his thrall to the Frida myth. Though he makes a diligent effort to present the concrete facts of a woman who ate earthly food and breathed earthly air like any other, she still comes off as both more and less human than the rest of us. On the one hand, a Mexican Sybil, a communer with spirits, empress of an otherworld of her own mind. On the other, an animal: the "dove" to Rivera's elephant; fierce and irrational in lust, hate, and devotion; cagey and oppressed in the presence of establishment. By either account, she was not one of us, and Fuentes depicts a creature victimized, forced to don elaborate armor to conceal her own fragility.

Perhaps as a woman I instinctively and unfairly doubt any man's rhapsody on the ethereality of another female. Women, like Swift, remember that "Celia shits." Perusing the diary only increased my skepticism of the maid-in-distress image. Every page bespoke a diarist in absolute control of her life and work. Here was the carpas girl, the sly and headstrong street imp who drank in the hustling, razor-sharp oratory of the plaza cynic-comics while learning the shibboleths of the elite at the capital's top prep school. Here was a woman who, maimed spine and legs notwithstanding, had the soul of a Mayan temple: awesome, baffling, and not opposed to a little blood and grit now and then.

Critics and admirers then and now often misunderstand her craft as both naïve and precocious, as if she somehow stumbled upon a radical reincarnation of Christian and pagan iconography, with notes of Expressionism gained by osmosis or divine inspiration. Frida herself relished this image of the voodoo savante, the phenomenon in wooden beads and handspun skirts parading around society like Squanto among the Londoners. She deliberately downplayed the obvious—that her father Guillermo, something like a Mexican photographer laureate, probably owned volumes on light, perspective, and the old masters; that the Preparatoria left her better and more comprehensively educated than nearly all her countrymen and many Americans and Europeans; that she was not just a prodigy but a product of circumstance and willpower.

Her diary offers indirect evidence to this effect. The writing, in ink or paint, is precise, linear, prearranged for all its apparent strangeness and spontaneity. She delights in stream-of-consciousness word lists: "bee—fondness—perfume—cord crumb—fool's gold—jumping voyeur—soldier ease," yet if the result displeases her, she blots out the offending passage (in obsessively perfect x's or curlicues). Ex-voto retablistas are often neurotically exact in rendering the morbid or ecstatic details of their divine pictograms, but Frida's similar precision is all the more striking for the comparison; she fixates as earnestly, though having no god and no audience to please here but herself.

When the diary takes pictorial form, as it frequently does, Kahlo's graphic vocabulary is highly allusive, killing the myth of naïve inspiration once and for all. Her symbols and emblems extend from ancient Egyptian cult figures to medieval physiology texts to Taoism to Marxism. (While I recognized some images myself, the more esoteric allusions are all from the book's helpful, if laconic, endnotes by Sarah Lowe.) Unsurprisingly, the most obvious influence apart from indigenous myth and religion is the votive iconography of folk Catholicism.

Having glimpsed an artist more "studied," in both senses, than she readily admits, I then wondered whether her diary-keeping was yet another performance. Could she, aware of her uncanny personal magnetism and growing popularity, have created a purportedly private document on the hunch of future public readership? And if so, would such a diary be "fake"? Enigmatic in life, inscrutable in death, Frida offers no straight answers.

With growing ferocity, our culture clamors for a truthful account of the self. Frida wrote and drew before the confessional came into vogue, but the press, sales, and scholarship surrounding the mass release of her diary will prove an interesting experiment in popular demand for authorial transparency. I can imagine a modern reader feeling betrayed by the diary's hints of faux-naïveté. I doubt, however, that any will take Frida to task for her frontispiece collage, which proclaims "Painted 1916" (though she began the diary in 1944). The deception is obvious and therefore benign; the question of how intimate and unperforming she intended and claimed to be deals more subtly with readerly trust and writerly candor. Yet her date is a boldfaced lie, her intent only a shadow of apprehension. The judgment of truth is a peculiar field indeed.

As is the reading of diaries. With so little to go on in terms of plot, sequence, or syntax, the Diary becomes a springboard for the reader's own jumble of free-flowing impressions. Even her devotee Fuentes admits and endorses this style of readership. Essentially, since I can't know what Frida meant by a fragment phrase like "bird lemon," my mind fills in what I would have meant by "bird lemon," which may be my aunt's canary, or may be the lemonade I once drank on an airplane. If read in this reductionist vein, the Diary becomes little more than slightly esoteric Muzak, that low-grade fuel of the human intellect in first gear. Avoid this trap. The Diary of Frida Kahlo is less stimulating for what it contains than for how and why its contents came to be. Throw in the tangential how's and why's—of her kindred retablistas, of her fellow memoirists of varying veracity, of a public hungry for "real life"—and there's more than enough substance to warrant a peek at her pages.

Laura Kolbe '08 began her first diary in third grade, which dealt primarily with deep themes of soccer, pet ownership, sibling rivalry, and a boy named Chris.