Anaïs Nin made her reputation through publication of her edited diaries and the carefully constructed persona they presented.

Anaïs 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 bigamous marriage.
It marks the start of what Nin came to call her “trapeze life,” swinging between her longtime husband, Hugh Guiler, in New York and her lover, Pole, in California, a perilous lifestyle she continued until her death in 1977. Today what Nin did seems impossible, and what she sought perhaps was impossible: to find harmony and completeness within a split existence. It is a story of daring and genius, love and pain, largely unknown until now.

"“Nin’s diaries still challenge and astonish today because she was utterly daring.…The unexpurgated diaries illuminate the spectacular process of self-mythology for a courageous wife, lover, and artist.…[In Trapeze], striving to reconcile a split existence, Nin finds herself marking down dissatisfactions with each man’s shortcomings and tempting fate in thrilling ventures, although she cannot help but behold both with understanding, compassion, and love. Trapezeoffers Nin’s solution to such a dilemma: embrace ambivalence. Choose everything, choose both, choose between, and choose all.”" - World Literature Today