Incest: From “A Journal of Love” —The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1932–1934) (Harvest Book)

The trailblazing memoirist and author of Henry & June recounts her relationships with Henry Miller and others—including her own father.
 
Writing with uncensored white heat, Anaïs Nin’s diaries were like a broad-minded confidante with whom she shared the liberating psychosexual dramas of her life. In this continuation of her notorious Henry & June, she recounts a particularly turbulent period between 1932 and 1934, and the men who dominated it: her protective husband, her therapist, the poet Antonin Artaud, and most consuming of all, novelist Henry Miller, a man whose genius was so demonic, said Anaïs, it could drive people insane. Here too, recounted in extraordinary detail, is the sexual affair she had with her father. At once loving, exciting, and vengeful, it was the ultimate social transgression for which Anaïs would eventually seek absolution from her analysts.
 
“Before Lena Dunham there was Anaïs Nin. Like Dunham, she’s been accused of narcissism, sociopathy and sexual perversion time and again. Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most . . . a woman who’d spent decades on the bleeding edge of American intellectual life, a woman who had been a respected colleague of male writers who pushed the boundaries of acceptable sex writing. Like many great . . . experimentalists, she wrote for a world that did not yet exist, and so helped to bring it into being.” —The Guardian (UK)
 
Includes an introduction by Rupert Pole