From glasstire.com
“This is my diary. I do not start it with the intention of ever letting anyone read it, not even to reread it myself.” Louise Bourgeois was 21 when she wrote these words in September 1933. The previous month, the young French artist had attempted suicide after her father tried to force her into marriage, and the year before, she had left a degree in mathematics at the Sorbonne to pursue art at various private schools around Paris. Bourgeois was a person in the process of defining herself, and her diary — which she began keeping when she was 11 years old — would be the closest witness to the rest of her long life. But despite her stated wish in 1933, what she wrote there would not remain private.
Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac draws heavily from the artist’s diaries, which, it quickly becomes apparent, were a vital outlet for processing, understanding, and transforming herself and the events of her life. Bourgeois’ art practice served a similar though more public function, and part of her work’s notoriety stems from its radical, autobiographical vulnerability. Still, the book’s incorporation of so much of the artist’s unfiltered voice grants readers unprecedented access into her complex and at times shocking inner world. Along the way, Bernadac traces Bourgeois’ groundbreaking career path, from her first major Femme Maison series in the 1940s to her iconic spider sculptures of the 1990s.
Bernadac is not a stranger to Bourgeois. The two first met in May 1992 to plan an exhibition of the artist’s drawings at the Centre Pompidou, and in the years that followed, the writer organized several more exhibitions and published books on Bourgeois. After the artist’s death in 2010 at age 98, Bernadac gained access to Bourgeois’ immense archive for her project — “Louise kept everything,” she notes — and even stayed next door to the artist’s home while conducting her research. In her introduction to the book, the author discloses her fondness for her subject, confessing to a hope that, “Through writing, I could resuscitate her.”
Still, Bernadac insists that she “strove for distance and objectivity” in her account. She is especially transparent about her subject’s “profound psychic disturbance,” which is perhaps best evidenced in Bourgeois’ diaries. Frequent selections from those pages immerse the reader in the artist’s innermost thoughts and feelings, showing her to be, in Bernadac’s words, “jealous, manipulative, depressive, lacking in self-confidence, [and] often devastated by terror.”
The diaries are interwoven through nearly every chapter of the book, and the pain recorded there is at times overwhelming to read. But could we expect any less from the creator of such searing, psychological artworks? And are diaries even truly diaries if they’re not written with excruciating candour? To be fair, later in her life, Bourgeois saw her diaries as crucial records of her own story. “The diary must be seen as a distinct, living entity,” she wrote in 1990, and translator Lauren Elkin handles these unique, often emotionally raw documents — which are penned in Bourgeois’ idiosyncratic blend of French and English — with aplomb.
Bourgeois’ life spanned nearly all of the 20th century. Born in 1911 to a cultured Parisian family, the artist quickly became her parents’ beloved “pink diamond” and the clear favourite among her siblings. While Bourgeois clearly benefitted from this position — she alone was dressed in designer clothing and taken on her parents’ travels — Bernadac argues that the situation converted the artist into “a pawn in the game of power and one-upmanship between her parents,” who were locked in their own cycles of illness (Bourgeois’ mother) and infidelity (her father). “I escaped from a very troubling family,” the artist later reflected about her sudden 1938 marriage to the celebrated American art historian Robert Goldwater and subsequent move to New York City.
In fact, the “trouble” stemming from both Bourgeois’ relationship with her parents and their relationship with each other makes up a large part of the book, as its complexities and consequences continued to haunt the artist and to serve as a powerful impetus for her artworks. Despite the deep psychic wounds they inflicted, Bourgeois repeated the problematic patterns of favouritism and adultery in her own family. Her French-born adopted son Michel was sent off to boarding school and left in the United States for months at a time while Bourgeois, her husband, and their two biological children lived together in New York and travelled to France. And though she denounced her father’s cheating as disastrous to her own psyche, Bourgeois also carried on affairs with other men, including possibly the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) director Alfred Barr, who the diaries show to be a source of passionate, if frustrated, longing.
Bernadac glosses over these poignant personal events without much detail, but she does not sidestep Bourgeois’ acerbic personality, which — along with her undeniably original artwork — often put her at odds with artists in both her adopted homeland and her native France. Some of her difficulty stemmed from what the author calls “the decidedly macho environment of New York,” where both locals and European émigrés put Bourgeois off; the artist later said that surrealists like André Breton and Marcel Duchamp “were not interested in women.” However, Bourgeois seemed to reserve her harshest criticism and fiercest mistrust for her fellow women artists. She calls her long-term rival Louise Nevelson “a parasite,” and writes that Polish artist Alina Szapocznikow “has a face like a crumpled rag.”
These judgments were perhaps connected to Bourgeois’ profound sense of dissatisfaction. Indeed, she was so ahead of her time — and so challenged by internal and external barriers — that definitive success did not arrive until a major retrospective at MoMA in 1982, when the artist was 70 years old. Though she later denied it, Bourgeois spent years in psychoanalysis, sometimes attending several sessions per week. The memories and feelings that she examined there enriched and informed her artwork, as Bernadac shows, but they never quite resolved. One of the most surprising discoveries in the book — in view of the artist’s current celebrity and renown — is Bourgeois’ pervasive and at times debilitating feelings of doubt, loneliness, and insecurity, which continued even into her later years when she had attained an undeniable level of achievement and recognition. “I have a terrible fear of being revealed, lacking, inadequate,” she confessed in her diary in 1990.
The word “obsession” appears repeatedly throughout the book to describe the artist’s ongoing themes of memory, maternity, eroticism, abandonment, castration, and control, which she explored through a stunning variety of materials and methods. “My emotions are my demons,” she said in the 2008 film Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, The Mistress, and The Tangerine, and in her book Bernadac demonstrates time and time again how the artist transformed those dark forces into her innovative art. And a great part of that evolution, we learn, also happened through her daily journaling practice. “You can stand anything if you write it down,” Bourgeois wrote in her diary in 1994. “All you need is pen and paper.”
Knife-Woman: The Life of Louise Bourgeois by Marie-Laure Bernadac was published by Yale University Press on October 21, 2025.
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