Name: Kiki's Memoirs
ISBN: 9780880014960

kiki

Presents the memoirs of a model who reigned over Montparnasse in the twenties

Kiki's Memoirs

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Kiki’s Memoirs has an introduction written by Ernest Hemingway — a rare honor. Writes Hemingway, “This is the only book I have ever written an introduction for, and God help me, the only one I ever will… It is written by a woman who, as far as I know, never had a Room of Her Own… you have a book here written by a woman who was never a lady at any time. For about ten years she was about as close as people get nowadays to being a Queen but that, of course, is very different from being a lady.” <br /><br />Kiki was a Queen of the bohemian scene in the Parisian neighborhood of Montparnasse, where she eventually landed after moving from Burgundy to Paris when she was twelve. “Little by little, I made my way into artistic circles, so full of wayward charm… I was so very gay that my poverty didn’t make so much as a dent ; and such words as “kill-joy”, “gloom”, “the blues” were just so much Hebrew so far as I was concerned.” Kiki finds odd jobs and eventually begins posing for artists like Foujita –”the thing that astonished him about me was the lack of hair on my sexual parts — and Man Ray, the Philadelphia-born Jewish photographer with whom Kiki was romantically involved with for much of the 1920s, and whose loving photographs of Kiki –both posing and casual — are one of the book’s highlights.<br /><br />Kiki’s Memoirs is a surprising sparse about Man Ray and the 1920s. She does not dwell on the details, leaving one with an incomplete picture of her life. Surely something is lost in the translation from the French, but I did get a vivid sense of Kiki’s flippant, spirited sweetness. Here is a typical passage in which Kiki discusses doing cocaine with a rich gentleman she just met: "Now and then, I could see him take a little box with a pretty little spoon in it and stick the spoon up his nose! I didn’t know what it was all about, until he went and left me alone. I then did the same thing he had done, and I suddenly felt very happy."

Kiki's Memoirs

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