"Mirages" opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anais Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be the One, the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as hell, during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anais wrote, Close your eyes to the ugly things, and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world s...

Anais Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented. It was not until decades later, when the diaries were published in their unexpurgated form, that the world began to learn the full details of Nin s fascinating life and the emotional and literary high-wire acts she committed both in documenting it and in defying the mores of 1950s America. Trapeze begins where the previous volume, Mirages, left off: when Nin met Rupert Pole, the young man who became not only her lover but later her husband in a...