When her right leg began thinning, the Kahlos attributed the withering to “a wooden log that a little boy threw at my foot,” Kahlo told Campos. Though she gave her birth date as July 7, 1910, Frida Kahlo was actually born on July 6, 1907, in Coyoacán, Mexico, now a suburb of Mexico City.

Her continuously fragile health had increasingly declined since her divorce and was exacerbated by her heavy consumption of alcohol. Spanning 1944-54, the final ten years of the artist's troubled lifetime, the diary is a captivating commonplace book filled with Kahlo's thoughts, poems and dreams.In her last days, Kahlo was mostly bedridden with bronchopneumonia, though she made a public appearance on 2 July 1954, participating with Rivera in a demonstration against the CIA invasion of Guatemala.

Following her separation from Rivera, Kahlo moved back to La Casa Azul and, determined to earn her own living, began another productive period as an artist, inspired by her experiences abroad. On 21 August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Coyoacán, where he had continued to live after leaving La Casa Azul. Aztec mythology features heavily in Kahlo's paintings in symbols including monkeys, skeletons, skulls, blood, and hearts; often, these symbols referred to the myths of Coatlicue, Quetzalcoatl, and Xolotl. In June 1945, she traveled to New York for an operation which fused a bone graft and a steel support to her spine to straighten it. She had her first solo exhibition in Mexico in 1953, shortly before her death in 1954 at the age of 47.The 170-page journal contains the artist’s thoughts, poems, and dreams–many reflecting her stormy relationship with her husband, artist Diego Rivera–along with 70 mesmerizing watercolor illustrations. Her mother opposed the marriage, and both parents referred to it as a "marriage between an elephant and a dove", referring to the couple's differences in size; Rivera was tall and overweight while Kahlo was petite and fragile. By 1984, Kahlo's reputation as an artist had grown to such extent that Mexico declared her works part of the national cultural heritage, prohibiting their export from the country. They were demanding to know who is this gringa who has the right to do this to our national treasure,” Loomis says. During these final years of her life, Kahlo dedicated her time to political causes to the extent that her health allowed.

Because he has earned the complete confidence of several key players in the Frida story, Grimberg has been entrusted with some startling Kahlo documents—in particular a soul-baring clinical interview conducted over many sessions between 1949 and 1950 by a Mexican psychology student named Olga Campos (a classmate of Diego Rivera’s daughter by Lupe Marín). According to art historian Andrea Kettenmann, by the mid-1940s, her paintings were "featured in the majority of group exhibitions in Mexico". Additionally, notable artists such as Marina Abramovic, [292] Alana Archer, [293] Gabriela Gonzalez Dellosso, [294] Yasumasa Morimura, [295] Cris Melo, [296] Rupert Garcia, [297] and others have used or appropriated Kahlo's imagery into their own works. Frida, about 15, developed an obsessive crush on the 36-year-old, internationally famous, and prodigiously fat Michelangelo of Mexico.Although she still publicly presented herself as simply Rivera's spouse rather than as an artist, [29] she participated for the first time in an exhibition, when Frieda and Diego Rivera was included in the Sixth Annual Exhibition of the San Francisco Society of Women Artists in the Palace of the Legion of Honor. When Kahlo’s mother discovered some compromising letters, she removed Frida from the school and enrolled her instead in the National Preparatory School, where she was one of 35 girls in a student body of 2,000. Born to a German father and a mestiza mother, Kahlo spent most of her childhood and adult life at La Casa Azul, her family home in Coyoacán– now publicly accessible as the Frida Kahlo Museum. Like Kahlo, Grimberg grew up in Mexico City, where he commenced, while still an adolescent, his rigorous investigations on the artist. Frida told Campos in her clinical interview, “I am in agreement with everything my father taught me and nothing my mother taught me.