This book is not available to purchase on Fable
4.5
Apprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin
ByPublisher Description
A Revealing Look at the Mentorship—and Manipulation—of Anaïs Nin
In 1962, eighteen-year-old Tristine Rainer was sent on an errand to Anaïs Nin’s West Village apartment. The chance meeting would change the course of her life and begin her years as Anaïs’s accomplice, keeping her mentor’s confidences—including that of her bigamy—even after Anaïs Nin’s death and the passing of her husbands, until now.
Set in the underground literary worlds of Manhattan and Los Angeles during the sixties and seventies, Tristine charts her coming of age under the guidance of the infamous Anaïs Nin: author of the erotic bestseller Delta of Venus , lover to Henry Miller, Parisian diarist, and feminist icon of the sexual revolution. As an inexperienced college-bound girl from the San Fernando Valley, Tristine was dazzled by the sophisticated bohemian author and sought her instruction in becoming a woman. Tristine became a fixture of Anaïs’s inner circle, implicated in the mysterious author’s daring intrigues—while simultaneously finding her own path through love, lust, and loss. In what Kirkus calls a “spicy and saucy hybrid of memoir and novel,” Apprenticed to Venus brings to life a seductive and entertaining character —the pioneer whose mantra was, “A woman has as much right to pleasure as a man!”
An intimate look at the intricacies—and risks—of the female mentor-protégé relationship, Tristine Rainer’s Apprenticed to Venus stories her deep friendship, for good or ill, with a pivotal historical figure.
In 1962, eighteen-year-old Tristine Rainer was sent on an errand to Anaïs Nin’s West Village apartment. The chance meeting would change the course of her life and begin her years as Anaïs’s accomplice, keeping her mentor’s confidences—including that of her bigamy—even after Anaïs Nin’s death and the passing of her husbands, until now.
Set in the underground literary worlds of Manhattan and Los Angeles during the sixties and seventies, Tristine charts her coming of age under the guidance of the infamous Anaïs Nin: author of the erotic bestseller Delta of Venus , lover to Henry Miller, Parisian diarist, and feminist icon of the sexual revolution. As an inexperienced college-bound girl from the San Fernando Valley, Tristine was dazzled by the sophisticated bohemian author and sought her instruction in becoming a woman. Tristine became a fixture of Anaïs’s inner circle, implicated in the mysterious author’s daring intrigues—while simultaneously finding her own path through love, lust, and loss. In what Kirkus calls a “spicy and saucy hybrid of memoir and novel,” Apprenticed to Venus brings to life a seductive and entertaining character —the pioneer whose mantra was, “A woman has as much right to pleasure as a man!”
An intimate look at the intricacies—and risks—of the female mentor-protégé relationship, Tristine Rainer’s Apprenticed to Venus stories her deep friendship, for good or ill, with a pivotal historical figure.
Download the free Fable app
Stay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.
Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building tool
Rate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tags
Curate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesStay organized
Keep track of what you’re reading, what you’ve finished, and what’s next.Build a better TBR
Swipe, skip, and save with our smart list-building toolRate and review
Share your take with other readers with half stars, emojis, and tagsCurate your feed
Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesApprenticed to Venus: My Secret Life with Anaïs Nin Reviews
4.5
“For those of us who came to legendry diarist Anaïs Nin’s original published journals, which she edited herself for publication in the 1960s, she appeared to be a free and independent woman. There was a brief mention of a husband in the 1930s, but nothing more. She seemed a woman who lived by her writing, printing some of her own volumes, first living in Paris, then New York, before escaping to a life in the sun of California’s hills.
In the mid-1980s and 1990s the truth began to emerge – and reading of that truth felt like a betrayal as a reader and admirer of Nin’s journals. There was Deirdre Bair’s biography, simply titled Anaïs Nin: A Biography published in 1995 and there was the succession of a publication of Nin’s unexpurgated diaries, usually centred around a theme. From the 1930s affair between Nin and writer Henry Miller, to her marriage to Hugh Guiler in the 1920s, the truth seeped out. Nin had affairs with her psychoanalyst, her father, and a host of other men, while being married to Guiler.
Bair’s biography opened further seams of the lies Nin lived. That at the age of forty-four in 1947 she met a younger man, Rupert Pole, and went west with him on a road trip, falling in love with him and then living with him. She lied to him about trying to divorce her banker husband, and from then on maintained a trapeze act of living in New York for months at a time with Guiler and then flying back to Pole. She even married Pole, while still married to Guiler, who she never, in the end, did divorce. Both men “believed” the lies – both wanted to, it seemed, despite the inconsistencies and holes in her story.
When Pole phoned Guiler’s New York apartment in the 1950s and Nin answered – what was she doing there? She still managed to convince him with another lie. Says Rainer: “She had chosen not to choose, and in so doing she had entered the land of neither and both, the land of the absurd where no ordinary laws applied. Other women dreamt of having more than one love, of combining the qualities of two men into one perfect husband. But only she had dared to live that dream.”
The reason? Rainer quotes Nin: “No. I can’t leave either man because I know how it feels to be abandoned. I couldn’t inflict that on someone I love. I’m trapped by my compassion.”
But the effect of reading these lies and the truth on a reader who started on Nin’s journals at twelve was electrifying. I felt betrayed, and lost interest in her writings. I felt let down. How many other readers did too? Especially those who had considered her a feminist, a free, independent woman, first reading the diaries in the 1960s and 1970s as the feminist movement exploded?
Tristine Rainer’s poignant, moving “novoir” a memoir with true characters and dialogue, but in the style of a novel, as she notes at the start, begins in Greenwich Village in 1962. Rainer is eighteen and introduced to Nin and Guiler for the first time. The story intertwines the life of Nin with Rainer’s experiences as a young woman, entering academia, falling into and out of love, and, of course, being swept away by Nin’s guiles. Along with Nin’s friend Renate Drucker, Rainer helped Nin maintain the fragile web of lies she had told, helping to maintain the fiction her life had become – even as ironically, she struggled to write creative fiction that wasn’t based on passages in her journal. As Rainer writes: “Anaïs was always amazed at how readily an appropriate lie would come to her in a pinch, yet when she tried to write fiction, she couldn’t make it up. All she could do was rewrite and disguise her diary entries.”
And where Rainer succeeds is lifting the veil off the artifice that has become part of the legend of Nin: what emerges is a real woman, full of charm, a coquette even in her sixties, a woman who was determined to shield her two husbands from the fact of her bigamy. A woman who emerges as a true friend to Rainer in the end – helping her get over a broken heart, and being a supportive mother figure at times. The feelings of betrayal soften while reading this: you start to understand Nin the woman. I read this book compulsively, quickly, devouring the details of Nin’s life and Rainer’s honest, yet still sympathetic portrait of a woman whose charisma charmed all around her, not just the lovers and husbands. Nin lived a remarkable life, certainly, even if it wasn’t to everyone’s taste. Rainer remarks on the magic that drew others in: “The wonder was that Anaïs, a deeply flawed person— a narcissist, a bigamist, a liar, and a deviant— was so lovable. The wonder was that from such a defective source shone so much light before her diminishment.”
It's equally satisfying reading about Rainer’s own journey. While the story lifts the veil on her friendship with Nin, it also tells the story of a young woman discovering herself through work and love her own writing, her own journals and shows how she was shaped and encouraged by Nin. Equally, the friendship is not all plain sailing – and Nin’s flaws are revealed in Rainer’s memoir. Her duplicity could extend to friendship too, and one of the strengths and highlights of the story is showing both sides of a treasured connection.
Nin’s diary writing still shines, whether you’re reading her edited versions, or the unexpurgated versions that are still being released. Published this year is Trapeze, about her double life, flying between the coasts from Pole to Guiler. But the polished versions are now tarnished by what was left out – that Nin had a husband who supported her and her numerous lovers – and that Nin both had lovers while being married and then became a bigamist by marrying Pole. A marriage between the edited and the unexpurgated diaries might be the best read, but I suspect that would be impossible to achieve.
Still, what you can take from Nin’s life and from this superb evocation of her later years, is a wonder at the magic that was Nin, a woman who tried to live as so few had tried before, and certainly not in her lifetime. It took deception, but it also took courage to live and love as she did. And this book restores my own faith in the writer I first encountered at age twelve. Read it for this reason, if you’ve ever felt betrayed by the lies that were then uncovered. But read it and prepare to be drawn in, as so many were, by the magic of Anais Nin, the woman, the writer, the charmer.”
Start a Book Club
Start a public or private book club with this book on the Fable app today!FAQ
Why can’t I buy this ebook on Fable?
Can I start a book club with this book on Fable?
Are book clubs free to join on Fable?
