NYRB: 216 pages, $30
Paul’s memoir will disabuse you of any notions about the glamour of being an artist’s muse. She met famous painter Lucian Freud in 1978, when she was 18 and he was 55. She fell in love with him, and he painted her for a decade; in the meantime, her own creativity dried up entirely. In “Self-Portrait,” she writes about that stalling out, and then of how she came to create her later portraits, creamy and alive. She explains her own needs as an artist silence and solitude, even a separate apartment from her husband, who doesn’t have a key. It’s a captivating mix of memories, notebook pages and musings, proof that while Freud may have captured her on the canvas, she owns her image on the page.