Book dossier

Anaïs

by Noel Riley Fitch, Noel Riley Fitch, Noël Riley Fitch

Anais Nin was the ultimate femme fatale, a passionate and mysterious woman, world famous for her steamy love affairs and extravagant sexual exploits, most notably her simultaneous affairs with Henry and June Miller and her bicoastal bigamous marriages. In the mid-1920s, eager to break the confines of American Victorianism both as an artist and as a woman, Nin traveled to Paris, where she fell in with the legendary artistic and literary circles of the Left Bank. For the rest of her long life she lived as a liberated woman - an author of more than a dozen books of fiction and erotica, an uninhibited lover of both men and women, and an independent figure within the avant-garde worlds of Paris, Los Angeles, and New York. Nin's Diary, published over the years in numerous volumes, has been hailed as a breakthrough document by literary critics and feminists alike. It is studied in universities across the country, and Kate Millett called it "the first real portrait of the artist as a woman." Yet in the published diary, for all its elaborate detail, Nin did not lay bare her true self. She instead constructed herself for her imagined readers, presenting on those pages a carefully stylized image of the woman the world knew as "Anais" while keeping her inner self hidden in a literary labyrinth of mirrors. Now, in Anais, the first intimate examination of Nin's life, biographer Noel Riley Fitch presents an honest portrait of Nin's passionate, tumultuous, and sometimes bitterly painful life. Fitch reveals, among other things, that behind Nin's coquetry was the desperate yearning of an abused and abandoned girl-child, a lifelong insecurity that resulted in an incestuous reunion with her father when she was thirty years old. A long-awaited account, this book will complement, correct, and demystify the image that Nin so artfully crafted in her diary.