A daring reappraisal of the diarist and mid-century feminist icon－Anaïs Nin, establishing her as a pioneering artist and modernist

Anaïs Nin lived a sparkling bohemian life across Paris, New York, and Los Angeles, throwing herself into passionate affairs and carving out bold new forms of confessional writing. Her diaries, published late in her life, became a symbol of women’s emancipation, creative freedom, and the inner life. To one member of her “cult”, she was “the woman who embodied Woman.” Kate Millett called her “the mother of us all, as well as goddess and elder sister.”

But Anaïs Nin, paragon of women’s truth-telling, was an invention. To date, there have been less than handful biographies of Nin. From the early 1900s to 1977, she fractured her existence into dozens of narratives, leaving a lifetime of knots for biographers to untangle: Was she a liberated woman or a kept woman? Was she brave or was she a monster? Was she revolutionary or was she a pervert? The answers seem to rest on the societal norms of the moment. Accordingly, the last major biography of Nin was in 1995, by Dierdre Bair, and her depiction was so damning that Nin’s publisher of nearly 30 years dropped her from their list.

Today, a new generation is embracing a vague idea of Anaïs Nin, mostly through internet memes and snippets of her writing. In our current era, when the manifestations of trauma are finally being understood on a clinical level, social media has brought new meaning to private vs. public personae, and we grapple daily with a post-truth world, we couldn’t be more ready for a fresh take on Nin.

Journalist Katherine Rowland draws on a wealth of previously untapped material and reveals Anaïs’ splintered lives－obsequious daughter and incest victim, faithful wife and reckless libertine, artist and benefactress－and how much it cost her to keep them separate.

Ultimately, Rowland argues, to call Anaïs a fraud is to miss the point. Her diaries, long mistaken for naked confession, were in truth deliberate and visionary acts of self-construction. She was not simply liar or truth-teller, but a woman daring to invent a self that could contain all her hungers: to be artist and lover, muse and creator, a rebel in a world that offered women little space for such multiplicity.

Katherine Rowland is a freelance journalist, a contributing editor at the Guardian US and an editor at large at Guernica magazine, where she was formerly the publisher and executive director. Her feature writing on subjects spanning sexuality, climate change, communes, and belief has appeared in Psychology Today, TIME, and many other outlets. Her first book, The Pleasure Gap: American Women and the Unfinished Sexual Revolution was covered widely in the media, including by Oprah Magazine, NPR, and dozens of sex, gender and cultural podcasts