The Woman with One Hundred Faces
The Lives and Legacy of Anaïs Nin
Failed to add items
Sorry, we are unable to add the item because your shopping cart is already at capacity.
Add to basket failed.
Please try again later
Add to Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Remove from Wish List failed.
Please try again later
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
1 credit a month to buy any audiobook in our entire collection.
Unlimited access to our all-you-can-listen catalogue of 15K+ audiobooks and podcasts.
Member-only deals & discounts.
Auto-renews at $16.45/mo after 30 days. Cancel anytime.
The Woman with One Hundred Faces
Pre-order for $38.03
-
Narrated by:
Summary
Born in 1903, Anaïs Nin led a bohemian life across Paris, New York, and Los Angeles and carved out bold new forms of confessional writing. Her published diaries and, later, her sexually explicit fiction captivated audiences with her commitment to the inner life. To her fans, she was a “cult heroine,” “an authentic surrealist,” “a legend.”
But that Anaïs, paragon of women’s truth-telling, was an invention—and after her death in 1977, her carefully crafted image collapsed. For thirty years, she had lived a double life organized around separate marriages, separate Christmas cards, separate prescription bottles, and separate social circles, each ignorant of the other. The “web of lies,” as she called it, was so immense that she needed a box of index cards to keep track.
Drawing on a wealth of never-before-seen archival material, journalist Katherine Rowland reveals Anaïs’ splintered lives—obsequious daughter and incest survivor, faithful wife and reckless libertine, artist and benefactress—and the price she paid to keep them separate. Her diary was a place to craft these many identities in real time, and as such, Rowland argues, it was a visionary act of self-creation. Anaïs was not simply liar or truth-teller, but a woman forging a self that could contain all her hungers: to be rebel and lover, muse and creator in a time when women were given few models for such multiplicity.
Stylishly and humanely told, The Woman with One Hundred Faces is a portrait not of deceit but of devotion—to art, to imagination, and to the perilous task of becoming.
No reviews yet
In the spirit of reconciliation, Audible acknowledges the Traditional Custodians of country throughout Australia and their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our respect to their elders past and present and extend that respect to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples today.