Her love for Diego is the major refrain of the Diary, a repeated litany "Diego - the name of love ... But in the Diary Frida writes in a poem addressed to Diego, "In our delirium I ask you for violence and you ... give me grace, your light and your warmth" - apparently a less brutal and more complex account of the state of play.The problems faced by a biographer are not always simplified by direct documentary evidence. Herrera mentioned that the Diary contained frequent references to Diego Rivera. In his introduction Carlos Fuentes quotes Diego as saying, "The more I loved her the more I wanted to hurt her", which is very much the received view of that marriage. But in 1939, when this picture was painted, Frida was not only divorcing Diego. She had also just finished an affair with Trotsky, had just finished an affair with Trotsky's male secretary, had briefly resumed an affair with the photographer Nickolas Muray and had enjoyed a "very intimate" relationship with Madame Andre Breton, the painter Jacqueline Lamba, with whom she had spent several months in Paris and to whom she had subsequently written a love letter - to name but four.It seems that several readings are possible, but to give an interpretation which mentions dual racial identity, lesbian love, pain in love, inner turmoil, self-enclosure, solitude and self-division, while barely mentioning the artist's own statement that the origin of the picture is an imaginary childhood friend, is bold to say the least.There are other passages which raise questions about the conventional view of Frida's life.

But it seems unusual to describe a hand resting on a full-skirted lap as being "near the genitals". Herrera is clearly right in relating this picture to Frida's divorce from Rivera because the right-hand Frida is holding a tiny childhood picture of her (briefly ex-) husband. But the double portrait's split identity seems more charged than that reading would allow and Frida admitted to a friend that it recorded her unhappiness at being separated from Diego...".Herrera went on to suggest that the portrait showed the Frida Diego had loved and the Frida Diego no longer loved, that it also stood for Frida's European-Indian dual heritage, and that it might also refer to Frida's love for women since "each woman has one hand in her lap near her genitals".We are of course all free to find what we want in a work of art. As Hayden Herrera wrote in another book, Frida Kahlo: The Paintings, the Diary "says that (this picture) had its origin in her memory of an imaginary childhood friend. But in the legend of Frida Kahlo "The Two Fridas" is not linked to the artist's childhood. It has been placed at right angles to Diego Rivera's equally large portrait of his massive first wife Lupe, who glowers across the polished floor at the double image of her supplanter.

And she wrote it to explain one of her supposedly surrealistic self-portraits, "The Two Fridas", which she painted in 1939 when she was in the process of divorcing Diego Rivera. These pages, which describe a fairly common childhood experience, suggest that Frida Kahlo never entirely left that imaginary world. When other children were growing up and abandoning their imaginary friends she was thrown back on her own resources, and when she became a young adult starting an independent life the road accident cut her off once more.The picture she refers to, "The Two Fridas", a double self-portrait in which the two figures are linked together by a bleeding vein, is displayed today in the Museo del Arte Moderno in Mexico City. It has been 34 years since I lived that magical friendship and every time I remember it, it comes alive and grows more and more inside my world."This passage is followed by a sketchy painting of a child blowing on a window pane and drawing a door through which she will enter her imaginary world. But there is at least one passage in Frida Kahlo's Diary where the message is very clear.