The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the sphere of suffering shared, and in this case extended to the death march itself, there is no spiritual or emotional legacy here to offset any reader reluctance. It is thought he was killed by an illegal chokehold, as Eric Garner would be, in New York, 31 years later. Jennifer Clement is the author of Newton's Sailor and the internationally acclaimed Widow basquiat, as well as a collection of poems, The Next Stranger, which contains a rare introduction by W. Clement is the author four novels Gun Love, Prayers for the Stolen, A True Story Based on Lies and The Poison That Fascinates.

Later that day Jean-Michel comes back with seven “How to Draw” books— How to Draw Horses, How to Draw Flowers, How to Draw Landscapes, etc. He tried to stop but couldn’t, and in the end he died in the apartment he rented from Warhol on Great Jones Street, of acute mixed drug intoxication.

A lot of the early jazz artists, of course, couldn’t even walk through the front door of the hotels and clubs they were playing in and had to enter through back doors and kitch­ens, and I think Jean felt this was a metaphor for his place in the white art world: he had entered through the back door. In Jennifer Clement’s book Widow Basquiat, she takes the personal narrative of her friend Suzanne Mallouk — who was a longtime lover of Basquiat ’ s — and weaves it into a slender and poetic novella. Robert Hughes makes some good points, but back then I would have just tossed that up to a racist commentary.

Widow Basquiat also presents an eye-witness account of the drug-fueled insanity of the New York art scene of the 1980s. An account of Suzanne Mallouk's relationship with Jean-Michel Basquiat as told by Mallouk's friend Jennifer Clement. Mallouk is a psychiatric consultant to media, film, television museums, documentaries, authors, etc.With heartbreaking honesty, she shares with us both her own personal demons as well as intimate moments spent with Basquiat, the good, the bad, and indeed the ugly. We felt a bit like strangers and I made some idle chitchat and asked if his paintings were selling well. There it is: the mature elements of Basquiat’s work, worldly, reticent, communicative, crude and expert all at once.