Appetite for Life: The Biography of Julia Child

pp. 525, b/w photographs, “Anais Nin (1903-1977) was the ultimate femme fatale, world-famous for her sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller and her bigamous marriages. In the 1920s she fell in love with the creative circles of the Parisian Left Bank. She lived her long life as a liberated woman – author of 11 books of fiction and erotica, uninhibited lover of men and women, and independent figure within the avant-garde worlds of Paris, Los Angeles and London. This biography offers a portrait of her passionate, tumultuous, sometimes bitterly painful life. Setting out to demystify the image that she artfully crafted in her diary, it reveals that behind the coquetry was the desperate yearning of an abused and abandoned girl-child, and a life-long insecurity that resulted in an incestuous reunion with her father when she was 30. The author also wrote “Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties”.