Gods and Men: How Dora Maar Survived Picasso

Welcome to another chapter of Flight, my memoir about my first year of traveling around Europe in search of a new life, after leaving my old one as a professor, wife, and mother in New Orleans in 2022.

Thank you again for your support! I’m really enjoying sharing my memoir with you. And I love every comment you share with me!

You can catch up here anytime with the full list of chapters, updated as they appear.

But you can also just read the installments that interest you or that you have time for. They pretty much all stand alone. So feel free to read on without catching up at all, if you wish.

Below is the link to the last installment, in case you missed it. In it, I get to know Dora Maar, in whose house I was spending a month on a writer’s residency. I explored her relationship with Picasso and reflected on how difficult it was to find out about her life outside of his shadow.

Now on to this month, as I explore how Dora Maar lived the last fifty years of her life, without Picasso or much of any companionship. I’ve written before about solitude and the woman writer and my own grappling with solitude. Here you will find more thoughts about living without men, in particular, and a failed relationship I was still struggling to get over. This one’s a bit longer. I hope not too long. But I couldn’t bring myself to make any more cuts. I hope you enjoy it!

Last week’s chapter ended with the following lines:

Did Dora feel liberated in her solitude? Did she recover from her ordeal with Picasso, or succumb to it? I need to know.

How do you recover after loving like a dog loves?

I read about Dora’s solitary life, trying to get inside it, wanting desperately to believe that she wasn’t as lonely and sad as everyone assumes she was. I’ve spent too much time alone with her. Am I going to become her? Will the rest of my life be a sad footnote to my failed marriage?

My original plan for a new life was to buy a house in the French countryside. But this is what I feared. Too much time alone, in my own head. A writer’s life, like the artist’s life, is whole lot of solitude. Do I have that in me? I’ve been trying to be a writer for a few weeks now and I have nothing but false starts and journal entries and notes about Dora Maar to show for it.

This was Dora’s life. For fifty years. I can’t get over that—FIFTY years. She escaped into her art. Did she find peace there? Could I find peace in my writing?

Over the past ten years, I’ve escaped into my book projects. But I didn’t live there all the time. I would bring my daughter to school in the morning, work for 5-6 hours, straight through lunch, and then pick her up at 3:30. After that, I was Mom. I forgot about my work, I came out of my head and into her life. It was the balance that carried me through.

Now there is no balance. I’m tipping over into something. What is it? A kind of madness?