Ms. Picasso's book, written in collaboration with Louis Valentin and translated into English by Catherine Temerson, is of course more a memoir than a testimony because, while she places herself in the shoes of the child, adolescent and young woman that she was, she also speaks as someone who underwent a long emotional journey, including 14 years of analysis, to recover.

''I recount things as I lived them at the time,'' she said. ''But it is also an older person who speaks, who is serene, who tries to show understanding. I think my analysis made it easier for me to talk. I don't seek to be polemical, but I speak of very tough things that may be unpleasant for other members of the family who try to hide everything negative to preserve Picasso's image. I try not to give him a bad image, but I say there is the artist, and there is the man.''

Only in recent years, she admitted, has she been able to come to terms with Picasso the artist. After the French government took a large slice of Picasso's own collection of works in place of estate tax, Ms. Picasso inherited two-tenths of what remained, plus La Californie, the mansion in Cannes. But her first instinct was to store the works of art and to try to sell La Californie. The house never found the right buyer, but it was years before she restored it for her own use.

''I had to be an anti-Picasso,'' she said. ''I hated painting because it was the source of all the unhappiness I had known. But gradually I discovered that I liked art a lot, and I could accept my real life as the granddaughter of an artist. By selling off some works I was even able to buy back others that had once belonged to Picasso, some of his sculptures but also a Balthus, a Matisse.'' Dominating the lobby of La Californie is Picasso's portrait of her grandmother, Olga Koklova.

The sale of some works gave Ms. Picasso the money not only to live comfortably but also to engage in humanitarian work through a Marina Picasso Foundation. With two grown children from a stormy relationship more than 20 years ago, she was able to step outside her own problems only when she adopted three Vietnamese children in the early 1990's. Subsequently she helped organize and continues to finance an orphanage for 350 children in Tha Duc, Vietnam.

Even now, though, she feels ambivalent about exploiting her name, she said. Three years ago, after the Picasso Administration, run by Claude Picasso, decided to sell the use of the Picasso name for use on a Citroën car, she alone among the heirs objected to the $20 million contract, but she was overruled. ''I was then criticized for accepting my share,'' she said. ''But I am an heir, and I wasn't going to give my share to the others. In any event I give my money away.''

The dispute, which spilled into the media, again threw a spotlight on a fractured family that has only the Picasso legacy in common. ''If you ask me if I have a bad relationship with my family, I would say no, I have no relationship at all,'' Ms. Picasso said, referring to her half-brother Bernard; Claude and Paloma Picasso; and Maya and Olivier Widmaier, the daughter and grandson of Marie-Thérèse Walter. ''There is no hate or bitterness. We have never shared anything.''