Join us on Monday, February 1st at 7pm as we welcome Katherine Rowland to the shop to celebrate the release of The Woman with One Hundred Faces! More details to come, but save the date!

About the book

A daring reappraisal of notorious writer Anaïs Nin, presenting her self-mythologizing as a radical creative act in a world that offered women few avenues for freedom

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.

About the author

Katherine Rowland is the author of The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution. Formerly, she was the executive director and publisher of Guernica and the host and executive journalist of the podcast Seeking. A frequent contributor to The Guardian, she lives in Los Angeles.

About the bookstore

The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco since 1976.

Please note:

• Check-in for the event will begin at 6:45pm.
• Priced ticket holders (Book+seat, Pay it Forward!+seat) will have seats held until 7pm. Arrivals after 7pm will be allowed admission, but seats are not guaranteed.
• General admission ticket holders will be offered seats at check-in on a first-come, first-served basis. May be standing room.
• Space at the door on the day of the event is usually available, but not guaranteed.
• Books will be for sale on the night of the event.
• ADA accessible. Bathrooms on site during event hours.
• Events typically end between 8:30 and 9pm.
• Questions? tickets@booksmith.com