“I think of Widow Basquiat very much as a book of love to [Suzanne],” author Jennifer Clement tells Dua Lipa in this month’s Service95 Book Club interview. She’s referring to Suzanne Mallouk, the central figure of her memoir – which Dua has chosen as her Monthly Read For June.
While the world has long had its eyes on artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and the 1980s New York creative scene he was so central to, Widow Basquiat offers a fresh and deeply intimate viewpoint, sharing an insight into the life and world of Basquiat through the lens of his lover and muse, Suzanne, and written by their friend, Jennifer.
“The thing that’s so amazing about Jean-Michel Basquiat is that he created a completely new world,” says Jennifer. “That you can walk in and know, ‘That’s a Basquiat’ – he’s a complete original.” However, as the author explains, the book came not from a desire to write about the artist, but from works she’d long been creating about Suzanne.
Reflecting on the poems she’d written about her friend in their youth, Jennifer says: “I feel that Widow Basquiat grew out of [them].” She shares one of these poems with Service95 here.
On Jean-Michel and Suzanne’s relationship, Jennifer tells Dua, “They [were] traumatised kids. So young, and I think that they bonded over a kind of recognition of one of them in the other: that they were hurt, they were fragile, and I think they both recognised it in each other.”
What their conversation reveals is that Widow Basquiat is even more than a love story between two artists – it is a portrait of a city at a pivotal cultural moment in time (in this case, during the 1980s). “[Everybody was] searching for freedom,” says Jennifer. “For whatever reason; in their families or in their hometowns, there wasn’t the freedom that they needed to be who they were. And [New York] was a great explosion of artistic freedom and sexual freedom.” But the euphoria couldn’t last. “For me, everything ended with AIDS,” says Jennifer. “That was the transition to a different moment.”
Widow Basquiat captures all of this: the love, loss, art and the pulse of a city that shaped a generation. It’s a powerful tribute to a fleeting moment in time, and a reminder of the fragile, beautiful chaos at the heart of true creativity.
Discover Jennifer’s full video interview with Dua here, or listen to it with the Service95 Book Club podcast here.
