Alice Andrews - Trine Erotic

Trine Erotic is a beautiful structure of nested narratives. Reading it is like awakening from one dream into another. Evolutionary psychology teaches that narrative was the primal form of speech, and that we learned to speak in order to tell stories. But Trine Erotic is not just an engaging story. Alice Andrews makes skillful use of the latest scientific knowledge about the deep evolutionary roots of the modern mind to talk about human nature, women and men, love and sex. The skillful fusion of science with literature is no mean feat, and Andrews succeeds in bringing theoretical concepts to life by embedding them in the lived experience of her characters. I have included Trine Erotic on the reading lists for my undergraduate courses on Evolutionary Psychology.

David Livingstone Smith, PhD; director, New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology; visiting professor, Social and Behavioral Sciences, University of New England. Author of Freuds Philosophy of the Unconscious , Approaching Psychoanalysis: An Introductory Course and Psychoanalysis in Question .

With this effort, Alice Andrews opens a new genre in fiction: the reflective, biologically informed love story. Primal themes voiced in a very modern idiom. This is not biology in the old sense of simple animal instincts or even just the recent sense of selfish genes and the mathematics of human relationship games. It is also biology informed by our modern understanding of how we create and transmit meaning through words. The roles of the meme or fuzzy unit of culture, features prominently as a conceptual undercurrent here, but Andrews takes it way beyond being a unit of culture and illustrates by her own masterful example how it is also an agent of human transformation. Through her own storytelling, she seduces the reader into layer after layer of change in their own understanding, all the while explaining what she is doing. This is a relatively novel form of introspective art that both inspires and teaches. Two problems... we arent used to art being quite so aware of its own role, especially in scientific terms, and we usually arent comfortable with women consciously cutting through the haze of erotic games to see their own relentless Darwinian logic. Its exciting and a bit disconcerting as well to see female sexuality both revealed and unleashed in this light. Alice Andrews could well be one of the most important voices of our times and into the future....

Todd I. Stark, author of Seductive Approaches and moderator of Human Behavior and Evolution list

Trine Erotic is a psychological exploration into the consciousness of Woman, but this is not, by any means, a womans book. TE sheds a stark light into the dark recesses of the way the mind, heart and soul of a woman work as well as the relations between the sexesand what she finds isnt always pretty. Her female characters speak with refreshing candor about what they want out of life and the fact that they are not afraid to want it and get it. Think Bridget Jones as hip philosopher, and minus the self-loathing. With Trine Erotic , Andrews has created true heroes .

Brian K. Mahoney, editor Chronogram Magazine Alice Andrews V IVI S PHERE P UBLISHING NEW YORK

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2002 by Alice Andrews

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book. For information address Vivisphere Publishing.

Cover Design by Alice Andrews and Teal Hutton Author Photo by Rick Lange
Cover image: Cabanel, Alexandre (1824-1889). Birth of Venus , 1863. Oil on canvas. Photo: P. Selert. Copyright Runion des Muses Nationaux/Art Resource, NY. Used by permission.

ISBN 1-58776-121-1
Library of Congress catalog number: 2002101071 Printed in the United States of America

VIVISPHERE PUBLISHING
A division of NetPub Corporation
2 Neptune Road, Poughkeepsie, NY 12601 www.vivisphere.com (800) 724-1100

To every womans desire and the art within her. And for alpha males everywhere.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Do you think this is the only story in you? a friend asked, after having read love stories,my seventeen-page short story that inspired Trine Erotic . It was a funny questionone which had never occurred to me to ask. I had been compelled to write a story, and so I wrote one. I wasnt thinking about other stories or future stories; wasnt thinking about myself as a writer.

But it hurt some nonetheless; made me a little defensive: Of course I have other stories, I told her, as if there were some value in that; as if I had some storytelling gene, some story-making module or organ in me which I had to defend; as if to champion this one measly story by proclaiming there were others. But did I? I wondered. Did I have other stories? And if I didnt, did it matter one way or the other? Of course not , I told myself. But as it happened, it wasnt my only story. Who only has one story? (Anyway, its not just about stories within. Its also about the compulsion and desire to write them.)

In retrospect, her question was a challenge. But it was also my shock point . My waking. To write. Maybe to live. So thank you, Kim, for not being afraid to cause a little pain. There were other friends and family who read that short story whom Id also like to thank: Jim Andrews, Samantha Bennett, Kay Brover, Lisa Gustin Geiger, Nicole Burman Sichel, and Jessica Wilkinson. A cute dad (who happened to be an artist and writer) on a bench outside a classroom read most of it while we waited for our kids one summer, and I think it was his interest that inspired me to continue.

There were many longer versions that came after that first short story, including the final manuscript. And it was a true pleasure and gift to have friends and colleagues Keith Bardwell, Jacinta Bunell,Victoria Coleman, Rebecca Daniels, Pamela Horn, Monica Grudin, Robert Kelly, Elysabeth Lesnick, Brian K. Mahoney, Nikki Peone, Carla Rozman, Jennifer Ifil-Ryan, Rita Ross, Donal Dionysius Lardner Ward, Beth Elaine Wilson, and Marie Winn read and comment on them. Many, many thanks and sincere appreciation to you all.

I do especially want to thank James Brody, Peter Cooper, Rick Lange, Diane Perlich, David Perry, and most of all, Teal Hutton at Vivisphere, for their critical and in many ways loving attention to the manuscript, from form to content.

And finally, Jason Stern, for his head and heart, for helping add depth to the trinity; for his listening.
Writing is solitary, its true, but there is always an audience if you dare open yourself, like a book. And thats where the real art comes in. The dialectic. This book is alive. It is constantly changing. Your reading makes it change.

We exist only in the brief instant when we are seducedby whatever moves us: an object, a face, an idea, a word, a passion.
Jean Baudrillard
Art and nothing but art!
It is the great means of making life possible, the great seduction to life. Nietzsche

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culture

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