Growing up in the shadow of Frida Kahlo, partying with Basquiat: my life with art’s A-list

As a child she splashed around in Frida Kahlo’s bathtub, in a house that still smelt of the artist’s oil paints. At 16, she partied with Madonna and Basquiat in New York, living off ‘coffee, coke, Coca-Cola and Camels’. Jennifer Clement tells Chloe Ashby why she had to write about coming of age with a set of art superstars

(Left to right) Frida Kahlo, author Jennifer Clement, Jean-Michel Basquiat (Getty)

On hot May days in the Sixties, when Jennifer Clement was a little girl, she used to bathe in Frida Kahlo’s tub. Together with Ruth María, Diego Rivera’s granddaughter, she would fill it with water and treat it as a swimming pool, a place in which to cool off. Back then in Mexico bubble bath didn’t exist, so they would tip in half a bottle of old shampoo and kick and stir and churn. They didn’t know that the bathtub had once contained the great Surrealist’s body, too, and was preserved in a special and wild self-portrait.

“It was just normal life,” Clement tells me from her second home in San Miguel de Allende, a small storied city in the Mexican highlands. We’re talking via our screens ahead of the release of her new memoir, The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat & Me. Comprising brief and rhythmic chapters of anecdotes and recollections, it’s a tale of two cities, as well as a tale of the writer as a young woman, from her bohemian childhood in 1960s and 1970s Mexico City to her early adult years in 1980s New York City. It’s also a tale of the artists and writers she met along the way, and those whose legacies lingered both physically and in her imagination.

Clement, eloquent and assured in conversation, is the former president of the worldwide writers’ association PEN International, as well as the author of multiple books, from novels to poetry collections. The Promised Party sees her return to some of the territory of perhaps her most popular publication: her first, Widow Basquiat, a memoir about Jean-Michel Basquiat’s relationship with muse and mutual friend Suzanne Mallouk – Dua Lipa has cited it as one of her favourites. In person, Clement is the same as she is on the page – curious and candid – and eager to talk: this is her first interview about the memoir.