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Upon our return from Memorial Day, I will ask my students to take their Mexico City research to another level. This semester we read a 350-page historical novel based on the Life, Love, Art, and Death of Frida Kahlo. Every student in the class submitted an extensive research paper comparing what we read about Frida…
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I begin all my semester classes with a brainstorming activity to help students test the waters for their research paper selections. I find many students at this level are INTIMIDATED by research paper assignments. Maybe they are used to being TOLD what to write; they haven’t been told they can DECIDE what to write for…
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This had to be in the early fifties in Greenwich Village, downtown Manhattan, in the heart of New York City, where author Patricia Highsmith hung out and drank in a lesbian bar on MacDougal Street called Eve’s Hangout. How could I possibly infer that it was a gay bar? The first thing you saw when you…
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Frida displayed a pattern in her life to rebel against Anything, Anyone, Anywhere. In The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo, Frida not only rebelled against people she didn’t like, but she also rebelled against friends and family close to her. Clare Booth Luce was a friend. Chapter 18 begins with Clare’s bone-chilling scream at the sight…
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My life’s SLIDING DOOR MOMENT probably happened to me in my junior year of college. During the summer I worked a minimum-wage job cleaning dormitory rooms after students went home for their vacations. The job may have been a little grueling. All day long, I scrubbed floors, walls, windows – I remember moving a lot…
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This week, I reread one of my favorite novels from one of my favorite writers: The Cry of the Owl by Patricia Highsmith. I spent much of 2025 picking novels off my shelves here in Mexicali. My goal was to read 50 novels in 50 weeks. I’m glad I did. They all seemed to be…
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At one of my college campuses, Spring Semester 2026 begins next week. For the first eight weeks, we will read a novel called The Secret Book of Frida Kahlo. It reads like the title sounds. The Mexican author F.G. Hagenbeck took Frida’s personal diary and fictionalized many of the entries. I know this because I…
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I love the first line from Michael Tolkin’s Hollywood novel, the Player: “Just as Griffin suspected, there was a meeting in Levison’’s office without him.” I’m reading this book a second time. The first time I read it may have been in grad school in the late eighties. Reading this novel in 2026, I already…
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Shortly before Frida Kahlo died in 1954, she underwent surgery to have her right leg amputated below the knee. Her doctors had discovered complications in her foot caused by a lifetime of pain and injury. At this point in her life, they detected the spread of gangrene. Frida was born with polio, and when she…
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At my age, I have made a return to my shelves to read books I may have been introduced to in college but really didn’t understand. This time it’s Truman Capote’s novela Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I’m not to sure I understand it any better forty years after the first time I read it, but I…