This summer, I’ve been obsessed with Françoise Gilot, an artist who fell in love with Picasso. She was twenty-one when they met, to his sixty-one; they lived together for almost a decade, had two children. She remains, the story goes, the only woman ever to walk away from him: and it is this, her leaving, that has obsessed me.

After leaving him she wrote a memoir, a succès de scandale, which review upon review branded a fascinating insight into living with a genius, and crucial to our understanding of him, but which seems, to me, to be her own self-portrait; her way of figuring out where he ends and she begins. The reviewers reeled off breathless lists of Giacometti and Gide, Chagall and Chaplin, Cocteau, Hemingway, Matisse, the flamboyant characters who populate her book, but reading it, all I can see is her, her seeing them, and the rising knowledge that she was going to, would have to, leave him, that world, behind.

The memoir’s recently been reprinted and to mark the occasion, she gave an interview to a journalist from the New York Times. She’d been impatient, spiky. Why, she said, should I look back twice? Regret is for something you have not done. You have to be true to yourself, and only then, if there’s time, can you be true to others.

I look at the photo of her on the inner back cover: ninety-seven now, head slightly tilted and entirely poised, sleek black hair side-parted with a tortoiseshell clip, lips half-smiling, eyes candid and luminous and grave. But it is 152her hands that make the picture. She holds them up in front of her, pale and broad and thickly veined, left hand over right, forefinger just touching her throat. It is a careful pose, and an utterly vulnerable one. I look at it and think of Françoise at thirty, at twenty-one. Her respectable, upper-middle-class parents, who’d sent her to Cambridge and to the Sorbonne, expecting she’d become a lawyer. Her own children, barred, in his rage, from seeing their father after she left. The friends and the critics who closed ranks and condemned her. The public outcry and the outrage and the scathing prurience. Her necessary brusqueness: Why should I be afraid?

There is a painting of her infant daughter asleep in her crib that I gaze and gaze at. It’s got the Picasso style of deconstructed form, the child’s limbs flung akimbo, but it’s somehow much softer, less angular, than his cubism. The child’s face is perfect – the almost-flickering eyelids, pouted lips: you can see in it the love and fear and devotion of the young mother watching.