Self-Portrait

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

**Shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize 2019**

I'm not a portrait painter. If I'm anything, I have always been an autobiographer.

Self-Portrait reveals a life truly lived through art. In this short, intimate memoir, Celia Paul moves effortlessly through time in words and images, folding in her past and present selves. From her move to the Slade School of Fine Art at sixteen, through a profound and intense affair with the older and better-known artist Lucian Freud, to the practices of her present-day studio, she meticulously assembles the surprising, beautiful, haunting scenes of a life. Paul brings to her prose the same qualities that she brings to her art: a brutal honesty, a delicate but powerful intensity, and an acute eye for visual detail.

At its heart, this is a book about a young woman becoming an artist, with all the sacrifices and complications that entails. As she moves out of Freud's shadow, and navigates a path to artistic freedom, Paul's power and identity as an artist emerge from the page.

Self-Portrait is a uniquely arresting, poignant book, and a work of art and literature by a singular talent.

'Fascinating... Painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what.' Olivia Laing, New Statesman

© Celia Paul 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critics Review

  • Captivating… Mesmerizing… Paul’s powers of observation are keen and often ruthless.

    New York Times

  • A poetic, sometimes painfully honest memoir.

    Observer

  • I loved the painter Celia Paul’s memoir Self-Portrait. It’s fascinating for its account of her long-term lover Lucian Freud (he emerges as the ultimate man-baby, by turns charismatic, needy and breathtakingly selfish), but it’s also painfully honest on what it means to be a woman who puts art first, no matter what.

    New Statesman

  • The publication of this, her first book, is of great significance… Having recently returned to writing again, she has found a new confidence, in words, in herself and in her painting… No longer wanting to remain simply a part of Freud’s story, she wanted to make him part of her story, a narrative about her life as a painter. … Paul’s memoir therefore seems fresh, and comes as a surprise.

    Guardian, *Book of the Week*

  • A story of obsession and manipulation that sends our feelings on a rollercoaster… [Self-Portrait] turns into a sort of myth about the misuse of fame and the male ego, about the struggles faced by creative women, about the body in all its guises. Like a myth, it unfolds with confusions and contradictions, a terrible inevitability and many, many discomfiting truths.

    Financial Times

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