New York as weather. She's better on Robert than on herself.

I came to this the wrong way round, knowing the record and not the woman at all, and read it through a week of August when it was too hot to be outdoors before six in the evening.

What surprised me is how much of it is about being cold and hungry, and how unsentimental she is on that subject. The Chelsea Hotel chapters have been quoted half to death and they are the weakest part of it; the strong part is earlier, the two of them with one coat between them and a shared conviction that the work mattered more than eating did.

She is a far better portraitist of Robert than of herself. When she writes him she is exact — the way he would hold a thing up to the light, his obsessions, his casual cruelty about her drawings, the illness at the end handled with no music under it whatsoever. When she writes herself she goes lyrical and faintly holy, and I stopped believing her for a page at a time.

There is a great deal of name-dropping. I don't hold that against a memoir, since those were the people who were in the room, but it does thin the middle out badly.

I finished it and went and looked at the photographs properly for the first time in my life, which I suppose is as much as I can say for any book. Not a book I would reread. A book I'm glad to have read once, in the heat, with the window open and nothing moving.