From 1981 to 1983, they had an on-again, off-again relationship and remained friends until his death in 1988. While bartending at Night Birds bar in the East Village, she met Jean-Michel Basquiat. Mallouk worked as a waitress at Max's Kansas City, then a cigarette girl at the Ritz. Upon her arrival, Mallouk developed an anonymous telephone relationship with poet Rene Ricard, whose number she found in the phone book.

Mallouk arrived in Manhattan on Valentine's Day in 1980 and spent the night at the Seville Hotel before relocating to the Martha Washington Hotel. As a teenager, she became involved with the 1970s Punk movement and was particularly taken with Iggy Pop and was inspired by the book Rene Ricard: 1979–1980, and for those reasons she chose to move to New York City to become an artist, after attending art school at H.B. Her Palestinian father and her British mother, a naval officer, met and married in Beirut, Lebanon before moving to Canada. Mallouk was born in Orangeville, Ontario, Canada on September 10, 1960. From 1990 to 2005, she pursued her education and became a Doctor of Medicine with a specialty in psychiatry.

She also had a brief music career as singer and songwriter performing under the stage name Ruby Desire. In 1985, Mallouk had a one-woman show at the Vox Populi Gallery in the East Village. Mallouk was involved in the pursuit of justice for the death of Michael Stewart, a victim of police brutality in 1983. In 2015, Vogue magazine listed Basquiat and Mallouk among 'The 21 Most Stylish Art World Couples of All Time.' She is best known for being amongst a core of East Village creatives in the 1980s and for her relationship with artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, both of which are chronicled by her friend Jennifer Clement in Widow Basquiat: A Memoir.

Suzanne Mallouk (born September 10, 1960) is a Canadian-born painter, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst based in New York City.

Widow basquiat a memoir