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I want to tell you why I, who have nurtured so many other memoirs to publication, finally felt free to write my own memoir about my mentor, Anaïs Nin, and why it took me so long to address the subject and begin the book. What follows is the preface that I wrote for the opening of Apprenticed to Venus to be published July 11, 2017 by Arcade. It was cut from the final edit of the book for reasons of length. I put it here because I suspect I am not the only diarist to feel repulsed upon reading the outpourings ...
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Elle magazine included Tristine's upcoming book, Apprenticed to Venus, in their summer reads round-up. Read the article here >> Pre-order the book now through Amazon.com, Barnes and Noble, Books-a-Million, IndieBound, or your favorite local bookstore ...
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In 1966 erotic author Anaïs Nin, Parisian lover of Henry Miller, published her intimate Diaries and became an iconic goddess of women’s sexual freedom. Boomer women lived out the image of a liberated single woman that Nin crafted in editing her diaries, and young women are still pursuing sexual freedoms that she proclaimed: “A woman has as much right to pleasure as a man!” In reality Nin was far from free, entrapped in a life of deception, married simultaneously to two husbands she could not choose between. Tristine Rainer met Nin before she became known to the public. As an ...
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Anaïs Nin introduced me to John Ferrone, her Harcourt Brace Jovanovich editor, at her Silverlake, California house where she lived with Rupert Pole as his wife. John, a New Yorker, knew her other husband, Hugo Guiler, as well and was privy to the secret of Anaïs’ double life. As one of the most grace-full men I have known, both in his manner and his movements, he was at ease in the world of sexual/​emotional discretion. He’d lived the life of an undisguised gay man of 1950’s in New York, and it was a world he negotiated with integrity and subtlety ...
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Many modern lives do not look like a Hero's Journey or a Quest. They are too full of unrelated stops and starts. Women’s lives especially, are fragmented by constant interruptions. You are pursuing a career, then stop for a while to raise your children while they are young, then you may work with your husband in his office, stop to care for an invalid relative, divorce and remarry, go back to school in an entirely new field. Men’s lives now, too, are more fragmented than they used to be. You may be following a quest in your chosen career only ...
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