The narrative that Rudick presents is frank and unsparing, starting with the child Niki, who wanted to be half woman, half man, eschewing any fixed identity, and was aware very early on that she was born into a man’s world. Recognizing the power and freedom her father exhibited, and witnessing the entrapment felt by her mother, Saint Phalle developed a protofeminist sensibility, but not one that would ever be expressed by identification with orthodox feminism. We discover that in her private girls’ school, Saint Phalle was chastised and threatened by the headmaster for writing “wild pornographic pages” about her attractive male cousin. Throughout her life, Saint Phalle had turbulent romantic and sexual relationships with difficult men. She eloped at eighteen and became a mother at a young age, and later left her husband and two small children to pursue her art full-time. It was a choice both liberating and torturous: “I felt that I had done such a terrible thing… that I buried myself 100% in my work for the rest of my life to make up for it. I needed to prove that what I had done had not been in vain and had been worthwhile.” It should be noted that Saint Phalle did not abandon her children and remained a strong presence in their lives.

The book contains numerous handwritten, illustrated, and typed letters to friends and supporters, in which she reflects on different stages of her social and family life, and her career. The letters also recount, in detail, the realization of several major projects, such as the Nana Maison sculptures,

HON, and her enormously ambitious Tarot Garden, a fourteen-acre sculpture garden built in Tuscany. Her partner of thirty years, the Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely, is mentioned throughout the book as a source of inspiration and as a constant collaborator in the challenging production of her colossal sculptures. A letter addressed to him after he died pays homage to their unique artistic bond.