Fonda And Nin

"What I did not anticipate was how the story of my journey would also resonate with men."

- Jane Fonda -

After the excitement of my first Anaïs Nin reading, Delta Of Venus, I was looking forward to read more of her stuff. So during the long dull hours in Guarulhos airport, walking around while I waited for my flight to Salvador I made a little book shopping spree and among my items I got Nin's A Spy In The House Of Love.

Little time after I started it, I did something I've not done in ages: I Googled intel about the book. I found out that it had a lot of psychoanalysis content and that the heroine, Sabina, had many of Nin's behaviors and attitudes. Okay, I don't know if I've mentioned it here but I'm very into biographies and non-fictional books lately; so, to read a novel that has many auto-biographic characteristics... I was in heaven!

"A Spy" is a dense, sometimes tense, deep book about a woman who lies. Sabina has multiple lives that last as long as a love affair of hers last. What is initially an erotic and exciting atmosphere becomes a breathtaking and overwhelming report of a disembodied woman.

The word "disembodied" makes me think of Jane Fonda. In her auto-biography, My Life So Far, she said about how long she lived without trully knowing and taking who she was for herself and lived disconnected from her own body, her own voice. Sabina jumped from a lover to another in order to validate her various souls, her various masks. And the encounter with a young lost man like her made her realize how far she was from herself.

In another moment Sabina says that when one is hurt, one should run away for a while from the places and people that reminded the hurt. At that instant I remembered a passage in Fonda's book when she said one day during the making of They Shoot Horses, Don't They? she found herself driving miles away past the set's entrance.

The point in all this I'm saying is how fiction/reality affects reality/fiction. In a short amount of time I read two books that affected my life in ways I've never experienced before. First Fonda's saying how important it is for us to find our own voices and connect to our boddies; then Nin's reassuring that thought.

Looking at myself I feel rejoiced to certify I'm on my way. When I see so much young people like me lost from themselves till the point of not knowing what they want or where to lead, I feel both like crap and like a hero, for having overcome that obstacle. A self-proof is the previous post with the Dully Lighten Room poem that is exactly about a person who chose to be separated from herself.

So, to everyone I advice to read first Fonda's "My Life So Far", then Nin's "A Spy In The House Of Love"; or even Nin's before Fonda's, doesn't matter. The importance lies in finding ourselves inside ourselves, without outer validation, whether it's in lovers, substances or even religion: "happiness lies in the palm of your hand".

[Song: Secret - Madonna (cliché I know, but fuck it!)]