Anais 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.

Anais Nin's "Ladders to Fire" interweaves the stories of several women, each emotionally inhibited in her own way: through self-doubt, fear, guilt, moral drift, and distrust. The novel follows their inner struggles to overcome these barriers to happiness and wholeness. The author's own experiences, as recorded in her famous diaries, supplied the raw material for her fiction. It was her intuitive, experimental, and always original style that transformed one into the other. Nin herself memorably claimed that "it was the fiction writer who edited the diary."
"Ladders to Fire" is the first book of Nin's continuous novel, "Cities of the Interior, " which also includes "Children of the Albatross, ""The Four-Chambered Heart, ""A Spy in the House of Love, " and "Seduction of the Minotaur." These loosely interlinked stories develop the characters and themes established in the first volume, leading slowly toward a resolution of inner turmoil and conflict.
This Swallow Press reissue of "Ladders to Fire" includes a new introduction by Nin scholar Benjamin Franklin V, as well as Gunther Stuhlmann's classic foreword to the 1995 edition.