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Public Promotion of the Private Self

Anaïs Nin’s Self-Constructions in the Diary

The very process of the diary resembles that of a painter making a series of sketches each day in preparation for a final portrait.

—Anaïs Nin¹

Nin and her diary are so closely intertwined that the analysis of her public persona would be incomplete without the examination of the self-projections included in the published Diary. The Diary introduced Nin to a larger audience, brought her recognition, and launched her image into the sphere of media and society. The published version of the diary made available certain representations of Nin that would later be either reinforced or contested as Nin’s visibility in the public increased. Taking a closer look at the intricate relationship between Nin the person, Nin the diary (the manuscript version) persona, Nin the Diary (the published version) persona, and Nin the public persona is therefore worthwhile.

NIN THE PERSON VERSUS NIN THE DIARY PERSONA

Although Anaïs Nin left us with 35,000 pages of the manuscript of the diary and seventeen published volumes easily available to anyone, getting to know the “real” Anaïs Nin is impossible, for at least two reasons. First of all, there was no one “real” Anaïs Nin. Taking the postmodern view of identity as fluid, unstable, and impossible to fix, I assume that no one has an essence, a true and coherent core that is there to be discovered. People and their identities are multifaceted and changeable and thus impossible to pin down. The second reason is related to the nature of language and the writing process. Language was the medium in which Nin chose to capture and convey her-selves. And as she observed in the following passage, she became aware that expressing her-selves effectively and completely in writing was impossible:

It seems to me now that when I write I only write consciously or at least I follow the most accessible thread. Three or four threads may be agitated like telegraph wires at the same instant, and I disregard them. If I were to capture them all I would be really . . . revealing innocence and duplicity, generosity and calculations, fear and courage. The whole truth. I cannot tell the whole truth simply because I would have to write four pages to the present one. I would have to write always backwards, retrace my steps constantly to catch the echoes and the overtones because of the vice of embellishment, the alchemy of idealism which distorts the truth every moment.²

Nin therefore recognized the complexity of human experience and the impossibility of capturing it in words. She knew that writing embellished and distorted the reality and that any attempt to communicate the “truth” was doomed to fail because the “truth” was complicated and multidimensional. She grappled, therefore, with the question tackled by the theorists of autobiography, who consider the relation between the reality and the record of it, between the real-life person and the text persona.

In her study of American women’s diaries, Margo Culley urges us to remember that “diaries and journals are texts, that is[,] verbal constructs” and that “all diarists are involved in a process, even if largely unconscious, of selecting details to create a persona.” In a similar vein, Felicity A. Nussbaum notes, “The diarist pretends simply to transcribe the details of experience, but clearly some events are more important to the narrative ‘I’ than others.” Lynn Z. Bloom believes that the process of recording daily life is even more complex in the case of professional writers. She argues that “for a professional writer there are no private writings,” and she demonstrates that writers shape even their most intimate writings, such as diaries, with an audience in mind, thus creating public documents. This observation particularly resonates with Nin’s diary practice because Nin consciously worked on her diary long before it was published. Nin’s diary therefore contains not the “real” Anaïs Nin but the Nin persona.³

There is also another interesting dimension of the relationship between the real person and the diary persona. Writing about American women diarists, Culley observes, “Some evidence exists that the persona in the pages of the diary shapes the life lived as well as the reverse.” Similar observations emerge from discussions of Nin’s diary by both Elizabeth Podnieks and Helen Tookey, who claim not only that Nin constructs the text and textual persona(e) but also that Nin’s own identity as a person is affected in the process of self-writing. “The writer of any life text,” Podnieks observes, “necessarily creates herself in the process of self-documentation.”⁴

While it is impossible to measure effectively how Nin’s identity was influenced by her self-presentations in the diary, there is some textual evidence that Nin’s diary writing had a significant impact on her life. “I really believe,” Nin observed, “that if I were not a writer, not a creator, not an experimenter, I might have been a very faithful wife. . . . But my temperament belongs to the writer, not to the woman.”⁵ This comment provokes a fascinating question, namely, to what extent the need to experience is triggered by the need to have something interesting to describe. When one wants to write, especially a story of one’s life, as Nin did, one wants to have something interesting to write about, and a housewife’s existence usually does not provide captivating stories. Therefore, the possibility exists that writing incited Nin to experiment with her life.

What is more, bearing in mind the fact that Nin shared her diary and tried to publish it as early as the 1930s, we can speculate about how her diary writing was guided by the awareness of the audience and by the need to present herself in a particular way. Margo Culley emphasizes the importance of an audience, whether real or imagined, conscious or unconscious: “The presence of a sense of audience . . . has a crucial importance over what is said and how it is said.” And she adds that many diarists suppose some kind of audience, even if it is the diary itself, addressed often as “Dear Diary.” Nin’s audience beginning in the 1930s was real rather than imagined as she shared her diary with various people, including her relatives, friends, and prospective publishers, and this needs to be remembered while analyzing Nin’s self-presentations. In this regard Nin’s diary differs from the diaries of people who never engaged in bringing their daily inscription to public light and whose diaries either remained unpublished or were published posthumously.⁶

It would be neither possible nor advantageous to determine to what extent Nin the diary persona reflects Nin the real person, if only for the simple fact that Nin the “real” person is impossible to capture. As a result, the original diary contains her self-made portraits rather than reproducing Nin the person. The selves recorded by Nin did not reflect the real-life Nin but were Nin’s interpretations, or representations, of herself. These interpretations were strongly influenced by society, culture, and the times she lived in.

NIN THE DIARY PERSONA VERSUS NIN THE DIARY PERSONA

Before Nin’s Diary reached its readers, it went through a process of double construction.⁷ Nin first had to choose what to put in her original diary, and she frequently admitted that giving a full account of herself and her life was impossible. “I sometimes doubt that this can be considered a complete record of a life,” Nin wrote about her journal and explained, “Not because I have not written every day, but because I have not written all day, every hour, every moment. . . . The moment I catch and fix, when I can spare a few minutes and sit down to write, is only one of the thousands which go into the making of a day.”⁸ Once she selected what should go into the diary, she needed to decide how to “frame” it—that is, how to capture her experiences in writing—and she devoted a lot of time and energy to invent the best technique for her diary (as discussed in the previous chapter). Then the second stage of the construction process, the conscious and deliberate preparation of the diary for publication, took place. Nin had to select parts of the material, rewrite them by either elaborating or condensing them, and adorn them with photographs to make them more appealing for her potential readers.

How this process of double construction unfolded can be clearly seen in Nin’s account of her friendship with Henry Miller. In the first six volumes of the Diary, Nin presents their relationship as only friendship and literary collaboration, while the unexpurgated volume Henry and June and Nin’s biographies reveal that they were also engaged in a very passionate sexual affair. Nin therefore changed the content of her diary by either concealing certain facts or presenting them in the way she thought appropriate. Apart from manipulating the content of the Diaries, she also changed the form and style of her writing by editing her entries. A comparison of the original and published account of her first meeting with Henry Miller exposes significant differences between the two versions. Here is the passage from the original:

I’m singing, singing, and not secretly but aloud. I’ve met Henry Miller. When I first saw him stepping out of the car and walking towards the door where I stood I went blind, in my usual way. Blindly, I looked at him with a second vision. I saw a man I liked. I saw a mouth which was at once intelligent, animal, and soft, strange mixture. Then my eyes opened and I saw a man who was likeable, not overbearing, but strong, a human man, who was [intelligible word] aware of everything (In his writing he was flamboyant, virile, animal, magnificent). “He is a man whom life makes drunk” I say that inwardly “He is like me.”⁹

And here is the corresponding entry from Diary 1:

When I saw Henry Miller walking towards the door where I stood waiting, I closed my eyes for an instant to see him by some other inner eye. He was warm, joyous, relaxed, natural.

He would have passed anonymously through a crowd. He was slender, lean, not tall. He looked like a Buddhist monk, a rosy-skinned monk, with his partly bald head aureoled by lively silver hair, his full sensuous mouth. His blue eyes are cool and observant, but his mouth is emotional and vulnerable. His laughter is contagious and his voice caressing and warm like a Negro voice.

He was so different from his brutal, violent, vital writing, his caricatures, his Rabelaisian farces, his exaggerations. The smile at the corner of his eyes is almost clownish; the mellow tones of his voice are almost like a purring content. He is a man whom life intoxicates, who has no need of wine, who is floating in a self-created euphoria.¹⁰

In this case, Nin elaborated the notes taken after the actual meeting with Henry Miller on 3 December 1931. The original entry served as a rough draft that Nin expanded and embellished. To every original sentence, Nin wrote two or three, thus making her text clearer for her audience, as in the fragment in which she explained that she tried to grasp Henry intuitively, with her “inner eye.” The original entry in which Nin wrote that she went blind might have been confusing for the readers, whereas the published version makes perfect sense. In rewriting the original, Nin also employed literary devices, such as similes and elaborate epithets, which increased the readability and attractiveness of the published Diary.

Interestingly, a very similar description of Miller appeared in a letter Nin sent to him three months after they met and shortly after they embarked on their sexual adventure. On 9 March 1932, Nin wrote,

How did I single you out? I saw you with that intense selective way—I saw a mouth that was at once intelligent, animal, soft . . . strange mixture—a human man, sensitively aware of everything—I love awareness—a man, I told you, whom life made drunk. Your laughter was not a laughter which could hurt, it was mellow and rich. I felt warm, dizzy, and I sang within myself.¹¹

On the one hand, this repetition of words, phrases, and ideas gives us an insight into Nin’s creative process. The comparison of the original entry to the passage from a letter shows that while she was recycling similar vocabulary in making Miller’s portrait, she nonetheless made efforts to find the best descriptors and to polish her sentences in order to best capture his essence. On the other hand, the juxtaposition of all three fragments reveals how her various rewritings enriched the final shape of the Diary. Nin could draw on these different versions to create the ultimate portrait of Miller in the published version.

Yet aesthetic concerns were not all that influenced the final shape of the Diary: there were also personal and legal considerations. Nin had to consider what she wanted to and could reveal. She produced a very sanitized self-portrait in which she got rid of controversial material, such as her sexual affairs and incestuous relationship with her father, and some unflattering details, like a nose surgery that she underwent in her thirties. Portraits of others were also retouched. Miller, for instance, who contributed significantly to the revision of the final draft, corrected his own description and advised Nin on how to construct portraits of other personages so as not to anger them, because he was perfectly aware that Nin would have to obtain releases from people whom she wanted to include in her Diary if they were still alive.

The following excerpt from the letter to Hiram Haydn not only describes how Nin procured necessary permissions but also gives an insight into revisions that were made to volume 1:

The minor characters are all done flatteringly and will not question anything. Zadkine is a historic figure, Duchamp, Allendy and Rank are dead, we took out Rebecca West who is very difficult, others do not appear under their real name, Fred [Alfred Perlès] was written up by Henry [Miller], and by himself and as he wrote such a distorted story about me he will lie quiet . . . Fred lives in Greece, and it would take months to get a release and he is not badly portrayed as Henry asked me to take out what could bother him.¹²

As is evident from the above passage, some people did not agree to be portrayed in the Diary. Apart from Rebecca West, Nin’s close cousin Eduardo, her brother Thorvald, and her husband Hugh Guiler refused to appear in Nin’s published journal. Nin dealt with this difficulty in various ways: she removed such troublesome individuals, as she did in the case of Rebecca West, excluding her from volume 1; she portrayed them in a more complimentary light (for instance, she brought back Rebecca West for the second volume, mentioning her briefly and describing her only in superlatives); she invented fictional characters based on real-life people, as she did with her cousin Eduardo, whom she replaced with Marguerite, describing her in Diary 1 as “a dark haired girl” whom Nin “met . . . at the home of my neighbor” (74); she used other Diary characters, attributing to them words and actions that were originally spoken and done by somebody else (for example, many events that she experienced with her husband, such as the visit to the brothel described in Diary 1, were portrayed as if she had lived through them with Henry Miller). All these amendments had a great impact on the form and content of the final text.

There was also a question of audience, which must have played a crucial part in determining the material selected for publication. Margo Culley stresses the importance of an audience to the diary writing. By my arrangement of levels of self-construction, she refers to the first level: writing in the original diary. In the second level of self-construction, that is, in the process of final editing, the audience comes to the forefront. Because readers’ reactions (in the form of letters and reviews) to the consecutively published Diaries were available to Nin, she must have taken them into consideration while arranging the material, elaborating or consolidating it, and making it coherent, readable, and contemporary. The Diary is, therefore, multilayered, consisting of Nin’s version of her life as she saw it at the moment of writing, rewritten at various stages, and finally “cropped” to suit the audience and legal requirements.

As a result, six volumes of the Diary that appeared during Nin’s lifetime launched highly manipulated representations of Nin, easily available to anyone who was willing to read her narrative. Although the volumes promised to be the most private documents, they were in fact the most public façade of Nin. In revising them for publication, Nin carefully crafted her portrayal, and as a result, while reading the six installments of her Diary one can discern the best defined and most distinctive self-portraits.

NIN THE DIARY PERSONA VERSUS NIN THE PUBLIC PERSONA

P. David Marshall’s division of star performance into two dimensions—the textual and the extratextual—may help us understand the connection between Nin’s Diary and Nin the public persona. For Marshall, the “textual” refers to the star’s performance in the domain s/he represents. Thus, for an actor it would be acting in a film, for an athlete it would be playing a sport, for a musician it would be singing at a concert, and in the case of Nin, the “textual” would be writing. Then there is the “extratextual,” which stands for the performance of everyday life of public personality. According to Marshall, these two dimensions produce public personality, or celebrity. Consequently, he posits that to make sense of the star involves not merely the analysis of the primary text (for example, film performance, or, in the case of Nin, her Diary) but, first and foremost, the study of magazine profiles, television interviews, and fans’ involvement in the celebrity reception.¹³ For these reasons, this chapter deals with Nin’s self-presentation in the Diary, whereas the next one examines Nin’s participation in public life and her reception by various media.

As a result of the correlation between these two dimensions, Nin becomes in a sense the living embodiment of the persona that she created in the Diary. On the one hand, Nin created herself in the Diary, and thanks to its success she managed to promote herself through it. On the other hand, by publishing the heavily edited Diary and launching certain images of herself for the public, Nin was forced to live up to the expectations of the audience, thus building her public persona on her Diary character and also on the public reception of this character.

With the publication of each volume, Nin released self-presentations of herself that she had to maintain once she appeared in front of her fans. By publishing the Diary and insisting that it contains a genuine self and her real life story, Nin had to enact the persona she created in the Diary. This phenomenon has been noticed by Elyse Lamm Pineau in her thought-provoking essay “A Mirror of Her Own: Anaïs Nin’s Autobiographical Performances.” Analyzing unpublished audiotapes of Nin’s lectures, interviews, and discussions, Pineau identifies “continuity between her autobiographical and performance personae” and regards Nin as the embodiment of her Diary. Pineau also notes, “Performance marked the culmination of Nin’s autobiographical project, for it provided an ongoing, public, and collective enactment of her Diary persona on college campuses nationwide.” This ability to re-create her Diary identity contributed significantly to Nin’s popular success after 1966.¹⁴

NIN’S SELF-PORTRAITS IN THE DIARY

The release of Nin’s Diaries in the 1960s and 1970s coincided with the rise of the women’s movement. Several of Nin’s critics, such as Philip Jason, Diane Richard-Allerdyce, and Helen Tookey, have pointed out the importance of feminism to the success of her Diary. Tookey, for instance, has remarked that the “context of second-wave feminism enabled . . . [Nin] to situate herself as a woman artist who had struggled for emancipation, for recognition, for her own identity.” Nin’s Diaries, however, must have struck a chord not only with the women’s movement but also with other elements characteristic of the era—identified by Arthur Marwick in his 1998 study The Sixties: Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy and the United States, c. 1958–c. 1974—such as the importance of the young, the emergence of the “underground” and the “counterculture,” idealism, and frankness in books and behavior. My argument is that while Nin’s ideas about femininity were frequently at odds with the position taken by feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, her portrayal of herself as a supporter of the young and a participant of Bohemia must have appealed to the young generation and the hippies, who, as Elizabeth Wilson points out, were the new bohemians. Nin’s text, although originally written a few decades earlier, reflected many concerns and fascinations of the 1960s generation.¹⁵

Although Nin started the diary as an eleven-year-old in 1914 and although at different stages of her career she made plans to publish her childhood journal, the first volume that was eventually released, in 1966, covered the period from 1931 to 1934 (the years she spent in Paris). She likely would not have achieved the same recognition had she released the story of her early days. Despite the fact that Nin’s early journal is a valuable record of her teenage years, marked by struggles in a foreign country, it probably would not have had the hold over her audience that the Paris years had. After all, at the time of the publication of the first Diary, Nin was not an established figure in the literary marketplace, and reading about the adolescence of a little-known personality would not have been as appealing as reading about Nin’s acquaintance with Henry Miller, which constitutes a great part of volume 1. In choosing the opening date, Nin did not opt for her early days in Paris, either. She arrived in the French capital in 1924, and her arrival might have served as another logical opening point for her published journal. Instead, she decided to begin her Diary when her personal and professional life accelerated: in 1931 she published her study of D. H. Lawrence and met Henry Miller, along with other well-known personages. The choice of the opening date was therefore a well-thought-out and strategic decision.

The first installment of the series, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934 (hereafter Diary 1), gives an intimate picture of a bohemian coterie in France, features Henry Miller together with his eccentric wife, June, and describes Nin’s commencing adventure with psychoanalysis. Writing and psychoanalysis are therefore two leading themes of Diary 1, and they frame Nin’s self-presentations. Because of the simple fact of being the first in the series, and therefore probably the most frequently read one, Diary 1 was incredibly influential in shaping Nin’s further career. First of all, because it sold, it made the publication of further volumes possible. Second, it launched the first set of representations of Nin. The story of Nin’s life in Paris between 1931 and 1934 contained in the first Diary and later elaborated in two unexpurgated volumes, Henry and June and Incest, has been frequently exploited in popular culture. The Miller-Nin-June trio captured the imaginations of readers especially powerfully, and as a consequence, Nin’s relationship with Henry Miller became one of her most recognizable “characteristics.” For these reasons, the present analysis centers on Nin’s self-portraits in Diary 1, while later volumes are brought into consideration only when an indication of how these portraits developed or changed is necessary.

The second installment of Nin’s journal, The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1934–1939, published a year after the first one, in 1967, continues the story of Nin’s life in Paris. With the third volume, the setting moves across the Atlantic, and volumes 3–6 cover the years Nin spent in the United States. Diary 3 begins in 1939 after the outbreak of World War II with Nin’s departure from France and her arrival in New York. Diary 6 ends with Nin’s announcement of the publication of the first volume in 1966. Volumes 3–6 are far less coherent than the first two installments. While Diary 1 and Diary 2 are well constructed and read more like a novel or an autobiography than a diary, with the third part this semblance of coherence begins to dissipate: Nin inserts many articles and reviews and frequently quotes her correspondence. In Diary 3 and Diary 4, Henry Miller’s letters prevail. In his letters, which are usually full of praise toward the addressee, Miller mentions how much Nin’s help means to him, lists other enthusiasts of Nin’s writings, and encourages her not to give up her literary work. In Diary 5, the role of Nin’s admirer and supporter is taken over by another writer, James Herlihy.

Nin’s Diary always bridges at least two cultural perspectives: the times when the Diary took its first shape (for example, the 1930s, in the case of the first installment) and the times when it was revised, published, and read by the public (thus, “the sixties,” understood here broadly as the period stretching beyond an actual decade and encompassing the years 1958 to 1974). Consequently, while analyzing Nin’s Diary and her self-portraits included in it, we must take into account both discourses that accompanied the production of her text and cultural contexts that enabled its successful consumption, because “to ‘read’ a text or a work of art,” as Lisa Rado argues, is to “eavesdrop upon, to hear snatches of a much larger cultural interchange.” In the rest of this chapter I trace how the culture of modernism, psychoanalytic discourse, the myth of the bohemian artist, and interwar perspectives on femininity and creativity shaped Nin’s self in the diary. I also try to explain why Nin’s Diary, rejected for three decades, found its audience in the sixties.¹⁶

Naturally, Nin’s self-portraits, just like the cultural discourses that shaped Nin’s journal and influenced its success, are not limited to the ones discussed below. It would be extremely difficult, verging on the impossible, to present all self-portraits and to disentangle all cultural exchanges that contributed to the creation of Nin’s self and to point out how these corresponded with the culture of the sixties, so only the most prominent portraits and the most obvious cultural references are examined.

Nin the Writer

The first volume of the Diary can be divided into four parts according to the people who prevail in them. Thus, the first part features Henry Miller and his wife, June; the second introduces the psychoanalyst René Allendy; the third describes Nin’s acquaintance with the French poet and actor Antonin Artaud and recounts Nin’s reunion with her father; and the fourth one is largely devoted to her other analyst, Otto Rank. This division, with a new character introduced at regular intervals, was undoubtedly intentional. It was a result of a long editing process (described in the previous chapter), and the following comment made by Nin about the revision of the first installment may serve as another proof that she diligently planned her journal: “The balance is what is difficult to achieve. For instance, there may have been too much of Allendy, yet later it turns out the contrast was necessary to bring out the larger vision of Rank.”¹⁷ It must therefore be emphasized once again that Nin took great pains over the revisions of her journal.

The first Nin encountered in Diary 1 is Nin the writer—a portrait that would be strongly developed in the following five volumes of the expurgated series released during Nin’s life. Diary 1 opens with a description of the French village, Louveciennes, where Nin lives, and Nin’s house. Like a skillful novelist, Nin sets the scene for the events that will take place. The first few pages are abundant in literary allusions and comparisons. Nin compares Louveciennes to the village where Madame Bovary died, describes a village character as “one of Balzac’s misers,” mentions Maupassant’s fondness for Louveciennes, and likens people commuting to Paris on old-fashioned trains to Proustian personages (Diary 1, 3). The literary ambience is therefore perceptible from the very beginning.

After reading these opening pages, we can clearly see that Nin’s Diary is not what its label may suggest—a collection of spontaneously penned daily entries—but a well-structured and beautifully written work of literature. Nin’s self-presentation as a writer therefore takes place on two levels: first, through the text and texture of the Diary, which serves as the best evidence that what readers hold in their hands is the work of a fine writer; and second, through her direct self-portrait of herself as a writer.

As far as the latter is concerned, Nin introduces herself as an aspiring writer. One of the first things she relates is that she has finished her book D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study and that she is not interested in an ordinary life of mending socks, canning fruit, and polishing furniture. She seeks moments of exaltation, and they occur while she is writing (Diary 1, 5). Moreover, anyone familiar with the plot of Madame Bovary knows that the heroine of this novel is unhappy within the confinement of her marriage. Nin, therefore, implicitly hints at her domestic imprisonment—implicitly because, apart from the preface, her husband does not appear in Diary 1 (he does appear in later volumes but always under the pseudonym Ian Hugo, never as Nin’s husband). However, she also states that unlike Madame Bovary she is not going to commit suicide. Writing prevents her from this tragic step. She presents her writing as the only means to escape “a beautiful prison” of her existence, to bring a state of hibernation to an end, and to start living more fully (Diary 1, 7).

Throughout Diary 1, Nin talks at length about her attempts at writing. She describes her experiences of composing her prose poem House of Incest, the collection of novelettes The Winter of Artifice, and the preface to Miller’s Tropic of Cancer.¹⁸ She also devotes a lot of space to discussions of a writer’s nature. She endows writers and artists with a special role and portrays them as special, chosen, and unique. She states that whenever she writes she is in “a state of grace” and experiences “illuminations and fevers” (Diary 1, 5). Her creative sensibility brings on “states of ecstasy” that others can only achieve through drugs (37). And although at some point Nin compares writing to pains of childbearing—“No joy. Just pain, sweat, exhaustion”—in general, she presents writing as a very gratifying experience (315).

Providing such idealistic descriptions, Nin contributes to the construction and maintenance of the tradition that has regarded writers as creative geniuses, superior to other people. Nin’s idea of an author is grounded in the romantic, and in effect modernist, notion of an artist as a lonely, insightful, misunderstood, and frequently underrated genius, who sets him/herself (although when Nin talks about the artist in general she always uses a male pronoun) against society. And Nin promotes this notion throughout the whole series of her Diaries.¹⁹

In the first volume, Nin also tries to establish the origins of herself as a writer as if to authenticate her occupation. She traces her interest in writing back to her teenage years, quoting, for instance, an entry from her early journal, written at the age of thirteen, which reads, “I should rewrite my arrival in New York,” and then she comments, “Even then, I had literary preoccupations” (243). Similarly, while recalling her arrival to America, she recounts that as their luggage was being unloaded, she held on obstinately to her brother’s violin case, since she “wanted people to know [she] was an artist” (218 [original emphasis]). She also mentions that from a very early age she invented stories to amuse her brothers and that she wrote for a school magazine (219). Such self-presentation creates an illusion that Nin’s writing was not a career but a vocation, which again gives her the air of a chosen one, of someone special.