Naked Portrait: A Memoir Of Lucian Freud

At the back of a cupboard, not long after the death of her father, Lucian Freud, Rose Boyt came across an old cardboard box containing hundreds of typed pages, numbered and neatly stacked. It was her half-forgotten diary from 1978, when she was nineteen. As she remembered it, the portrait she sat for then was benign, the sittings arduous but uncontroversial. But reading the diary, she was shocked. She had completely erased how difficult the process had been, how many of his anecdotes, though entertaining, were way more lurid than she remembered and how unmanageable he could be. Naked Portrait explores Boyts complicated relationship with her adored father, the power imbalance in their relationship and her adulation of him. It is also a viscerally honest account of complex family dynamics, of a difficult childhood and the vulnerability of young women, told with great love and compassion.