The Diary of Anaïs Nin
Volume V was published in 1974, describes her first trip to Acapulco, the beginning of her double life in Sierra Madre, California as well as in New York, the death of her mother and the progress of her feelings and career.
[1] In 1986, Rupert Pole, Nin's surviving widower and literary executor of the bigamous diarist, began to publish what are now termed the "unexpurgated" versions of the diary.
When June leaves Paris for New York, Henry and Nin begin a fiery affair that liberates her sexually and morally, but also undermines her marriage and eventually leads her into psychoanalysis.
An intimate account of one woman's sexual awakening, Henry and June exposes the pain and pleasure felt by a single person trapped between two loves.
Published in 1993, This is the continuation of the story begun in Henry and June, exposing the shattering psychological drama that drove Nin to seek absolution from her psychoanalysts for the ultimate transgression.
This portion of Nin's diary, which was cut from the expurgated editions published in her lifetime, records her steamy love affair with Henry Miller in Paris, but here her intense adoration gives way to disillusionment.
She seethes with jealousy at Miller's wife June, swoons over poet and actor Antonin Artaud, neglects her protective husband, Hugh Guiler, and describes her traumatic delivery of a stillborn child.
The third volume of Nin's provocative and provoking uncensored diaries, published in 1996, finds our madly scribbling femme fatale in New York, where she's gone to get away from her doggedly loyal husband and from adored lover Henry Miller and indulge her fancy for analyst Otto Rank.
She tires of Rank just as Miller and her husband catch up with her, then, suddenly, enters a whole new realm of potent romance with a fiery man of Inca descent, Gonzalo More.
Just one page of Nin's extraordinary diaries contains more sex, melodrama, fantasies, confessions, and observations than most novels, and reflects much about the human psyche we strive to repress.
"I dream, I kiss, I have orgasms, I get exalted, I leave the world, I float, I cook, I sew, I have nightmares, I follow a gigantic creative plan," she claims.
Here Nin often pauses to improve upon life, which in the two years, spent mostly in Paris, covered in this volume, consisted largely of cadging from her complaisant banker husband, Hugh Guiler, to support her lovers.
Another was the swarthy Communist activist Gonzalo More, whose appetite for sex overwhelmed his passion for politics, and whose wife, Helba Huara encouraged his income-producing infidelity.
Mirages, published in 2013 by Swallow Press, opens at the dawn of World War II, when Nin fled Paris, where she had lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets Rupert Pole, the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection.
When The Diary of Others opens, Nin, at age fifty-two, has recently entered into a bigamous marriage with the handsome forest ranger Rupert Pole in California, while her legal husband of thirty years, the faithful banker Hugh (Hugo) Guiler is unaware in New York.
The first part of the diary, which is called “The Trapeze Life,” details Nin’s complicated efforts to keep each husband unaware of the other as she jetted between them, a process she likened to a bicoastal “trapeze.” At the same time, few publishers were interested in her feminine and introspective fiction, and she considered herself a failed writer.
