Anais Nin: A Biography, Deirdre Bair, c. 1995

Acknowledgments

Joaquín Nin-Culmell, John Ferrone, Rupert Pole, and Gunther Stuhlmann.

Gayle Nin Rosenkrantz: Thorvald Nin's daughter.

Staff of the UCLA University Research Library

Introduction 

"The idea of relativity makes many people fearful -- the idea that you are one person with me today and another person with someone else later." Anaïs Nin said this in a 1971 interview; I have been reminded of it every day since 1990, when I began to write this book. The quality of mutability was what intrigued me most as I struggled to interpret the facts and events of her life, for each morning, I was struck by how the Anaïs Nin I wrote about the previous day was fast becoming a different woman who required an altogether different approach and appraisal.

The author never met Nin.

The author says the book is large, but it is less than a third of the original manuscript and has been pared down to the extent that it sometimes merely touches on what the author considered to be important about Anaïs Nin.

"Nin had a lot of sex and lied a lot."

Anaïs Nin "lied"; she "could not be trusted."

Author's starting point: Nin's original diaries, the sixty-nine volumes of elegantly written prose, as well as the several hundred file folders compiled during the last thirty-some years of her life, into which she stuffed diary writings, letters from others and carbon copies of her own, or whatever else struck her fancy, from totally unrelated newspaper jottings to photographs of herself.

Chapter 1

A Most Unlikely Marriage

1902, Cuba
Rosa Culmell y Vaurigaud and Joaquín Nin y Castellanos -- parents of Anaïs Nin.

Rosa's father: Thorvald Culmell Christensen. Danish.

Chapter 2

The Ugly Little Girl

Born near Paris, in Neuilly, February 21, 1903.

Full name: Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell.