Eros: A Journey of Multiple Loves Book

This poignant fictionalized memoir chronicles the evolution of an extraordinary life in progress. Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio, one of the planet's foremost advocates of bisexual/polyamorous living, takes readers along on her bold journeys away from the mainstream and into the realm of erotic self-discovery, and in the process, offers her irreverent critiques of society, education, theory, sexuality, and epistemology. This reader-friendly book describes the author's early life in Italy in the politically charged 1960s and 1970s and her time in California; her journey over the treacherous path from graduate student to educator; and from a "straight" and monogamous early adulthood to her emergence as a person at all times prepared to defy convention for the sake of integrity--a writer and woman well worth getting to know! In Eros: A Journey of Multiple Loves, the author candidly recounts her development as an independent woman and single mother through her international and transcultural journeys. She shares her remarkable insights into mid-twentieth-century life and politics in Italy, into the culture and politics of American academia, and into California's holistic health practices and bisexual communities. Many of her views are unconventional; some are downright controversial, but all are essential to the context of her life. Eros: A Journey of Multiple Loves brings you along as Gaia, the author's fictionalized self, arrives in the United States in the early 1980s as a mom on her own and embarks upon her culturally mandated search for male mentors in US academia--in the effort to breach gender barriers in the publishing world. Her journey takes her to California in the 1980s and 1990s, as the experimental energies of the previous decades still lingered on. There she constructs her sexuality and realizes her lifestyle: Hippies and other new-age types populate the area around Cardiff. Hangouts line the Coastal Highway, up to the ashram of the Self-Realization Fellowship, with its meditation gardens on the sea-point. Then there is Encinitas, with its health-food restaurants, artisan shops, and metaphysical bookstores. The colorful flyers posted to ubiquitous advertising boards speak of a community bursting with energy. Neo-pagan fire-walks, moonlight Wicca rituals, discounted massage sessions, biofeedback, guided meditation, all kinds of new holistic-health methods are the kinds of activities one can get involved in. The whole area is very environmentally conscious. The area around the ashram teems with healers in various specialties. The Sunday market smells of incense and sage, with wind chimes dangling from the stands, and new-age CDs on vendors' boom-boxes. It is there that I healed from the diseases of modernity. The author was raised in Italy, by a father who was a congressman and a cabinet vice minister. In an especially poignant section she writes directly to her Italian daughter Sara--about her politically charged upbringing in Italy and why she left for America: Perhaps my departure to the New World was a way to evade a situation where I saw no future for you or me. The [Italian] system was besieged by opposing forces which polarized the tensions that resulted from Italy's strategic position with respect to the Iron Curtain. Thanks to superpower ideology, we grew up knowing nothing about our Eastern neighbors--their mysterious world wrapped in a cloud of biased information. Little did we know that while they lay dying in a stagnant economy, we were enduring the growing pains of a country in the process of coming into postmodernity from a largely premodern state. Sara, would Italians of your generation behave more mercifully toward their guest workers than German, French, American, Argentinean, and Australian hosts had behaved toward the destitute Italian immigrants of yore? I crossed the ocean with a university degree and acquired another in the process, only to find out that, for all my education, I was but a speck in that migrant flow anyway. From her educational beginnings in a Montessori school--and her mother's role as an outspoken advocate of that style of schooling--to her love of nudity and freedom from bodily inhibitions, which also came naturally, from her mother, the author reveals her innermost thoughts and shares the wisdom her remarkable life has blessed her with. Eros: A Journey of Multiple Loves is an extraordinary read for anyone who wants to expand their horizons and take a fresh look at what humanity is all about.Read More