THE SURRENDER is a book that I thought would never be published, perhaps even should not be published not because of the “taboo” sexual subject – there is no subject not worthy of words – but because I did not know if I had managed to capture the crazy beauty of the obsession, the abyss into which I had fallen for over four years. In the midst of the most passionate and unusual love affair of my life – as he plunged into me I felt like a skinless child plunged into the center of a great spinning mystery – I kept notes in the attempt to understand and to survive such perilous desire.

I learned many things: that lust can certainly lead to love but also that I trust lust more than love. This is my failing I am told but it is in keeping with my training as a ballerina who worked every day for over twenty years starting at age four in the attempt to mold my body into an instrument capable of conveying beauty. I do not place any physical experience in life, including sex, as being “beneath” the life of the mind. In fact, I trust the physical more than anything else. It has always been through my body, through dancing as with sex, that I know things most deeply. For me, the physical is metaphysical and finding spirit through sodomy is paradox, sexualized, laced in irony.

That THE SURRENDER became a book, published first in America and then all over the world, and has now become alive again in three-dimensions is proof, if such were needed, that following one’s gut – in my case rather literally – is not just worthwhile, but is the route, however unusual, to true connection. And connection, as E. M. Forster has written, is indeed everything. I connected with this man and now I connect, perhaps, with you.

--Toni Bentley (Program Notes)

Toni Bentley
The Surrender, An Erotic Memoir