Some of My Lives: A Scrapbook Memoir by Rosamond Bernier
The world’s most glamorous art lecturer turned memoirist, Rosamond Bernier, who recently turned 95, has tamed wild animals, flown her own plane, and befriended the likes of Henri Matisse, Leonard Bernstein, and Frida Kahlo. As an expatriate American in Mexico during the 1940s, she presided over a menagerie that included an ocelot, an anteater, spider monkeys, various tropical birds, and (most incongruously) a small penguin, which she took swimming off the coast of a then largely undiscovered Acapulco.
Rosamond Bernier has lived an unusually full life-remarkable for its vividness and diversity of experience-and she has known many (one is tempted to say all) of the greatest artists and composers of the twentieth century.
In Some of My Lives, Bernier has made a kind of literary scrapbook from an extraordinary array of writings, ranging from diary entries to her many contributions to the art journal L’OEIL, which she cofounded in 1955. The result is a multifaceted self-portrait of a life informed and surrounded by the arts.
Through the stories of her encounters with some of the twentieth century’s great artists and composers-including Pablo Picasso, Leonard Bernstein, Max Ernst, Aaron Copeland, Malcolm Lowry, and Karl Lagerfeld-we come to understand the sheer richness of Bernier’s experiences, interactions, and memories. The result is pithy, hilarious, and wise-a richly rewarding chronicle of many lives fully lived. A fascinating read! More here at Vogue.com
$19 Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (October 11, 2011) from Amazon
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