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To Live is to Perform: The Self-Fictionalisation of Anaïs Nin

Anaïs Nin (1903 - 1977) was a novelist and a diarist who, in her tender, soulful works, tangled the imaginative nature of fiction with the personal nature of reality. She was born near Paris to a family of artists  - a composer father and a classically trained singer mother - and developed artistic tendencies from an early age. Her very first known literary work was the diary she began at just eleven years old, which stemmed from an unsent letter to her father, written aboard a ship to New York, in hopes of luring him back to the family he had abandoned. From there, the vastness of her works grew in both number and variety, creating a universe of its own with an utter lack of certainty between truth and fiction, between beauty and madness. 


I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live.”


Nin’s own person was the centre of the majority of her works, as eventually, her diary became a means of exploration and fulfilment of self. She managed to maintain a fascinating account consisting of more than a quarter of a hundred thousand hand-written diary pages, focused majorly on the labyrinth of her mind and soul, as well as her relationships with those dear to her. She barely ever referred to the impactful happenings of the outer world, despite wars, the Holocaust, and the Great Depression being only some of the events shaping it at the time of her writing.  While ushering away readers who labelled Nin as overly self-absorbed and erroneous, her admirers were instead fascinated by her capability to stretch her own being, alongside her works of fiction, into such an impressive number of pages. Nin depicted just how much of self there was to write about, in a time and culture which, in this regard, were awfully restrictive to women. 


“The writer is exposing himself in any form, ultimately, as we do in love, but it is a risk we must take.”


This, however, is where the matter of truth’s limits being blurred arises. 


Parts of the diaries were heavily edited and altered, at times even decades after they were written, right before Nin agreed to publish them in the 60s. On one hand, it can be speculated that something, whether it was insecurity of self or fear of representing the dullness of plain reality, prevented her from opening up to the world via words that were written from utter emotion and presentness of moment, rather than strategic creativity. On the other hand, one may consider it not prevention, but a newly-discovered freedom. Nin realised and practised the art of not owing the world an accurate, complete account of who she was. Instead, she made it her aim to entertain, engage, and enchant, even if her means did not include complete honesty. 


“We are limited as it is without weighing ourselves down with facts which do not inspire, nourish, liberate us.”


Thus, she became a symbol of the commonly felt desire to present oneself to the world as a story, a myth, too fluid to be limited by a rigid definition. Who we are and who we are perceived to be are not as necessarily coexistent as one might think, and Nin exploits this notion beautifully. Ranging from graceful and feminine to beguiling and fatal, she toys with her reflection onto the world using her remarkable connection with words, leaving her readers in love or baffled, deceived or mesmerised (though in most cases, all at once). 


Why it worked for Nin was because she was sure of who she was when living outside of her story. She was made not only of her conscious being, but of her unconscious, of all the dreams and thoughts lingering in between the two, and a great deal of her loveliness existed in her acknowledgment of and pride in this. Her emotional intelligence and deep link to her inner world allowed her to process every social situation she had found herself in, and accordingly adjust her persona to make the most out of each interaction. An assured shift of self-image for the delight of others, proven effective by the countless, ranging from old to young, from fellow literature enthusiasts to youths wild with ideas, who reported to have become utterly smitten with the diarist after meeting her, even if the meeting took place only once or briefly. 


“The great beauty of my life is that I live out what others only dream about, talk about, analyse. I want to go on living the uncensored dream, the free unconscious. … Perhaps my illusion … is not illusion, but intuition. Intuition of potentials, of the future, of the not-yet-born.”


This was Nin’s guide not only in short-lived acquaintances and meetings but in more permanent relationships of her life, as shown by her case of bigamy. After more than two decades of marriage to  Hugo Guiler, who was a source of stability and financial security in Nin’s life, she got engaged to much younger Rupert Pole, who came to balance her love life as an endless fount of passion and inspiration. For years, Nin kept each husband entirely concealed from the other, travelling every few weeks between her two homes in New York and Los Angeles, bringing along a neverending flurry of lies and illusions everywhere she went. The Anaïs Nins known by her husbands were performances of two people with utterly differing stories and ways, created to perfectly fit the mould of each man’s love.


However, imitators of such illusions risk losing themselves in this new persona they take up. The trapeze balancing between one’s true self and one’s performance of self is about as unsteady as moonlight on water, and one is bound to fall into loss if one takes upon this endeavour carelessly. Especially in contemporary times, when it is so simple to persuade one, even more so if young and lacking in assurance of self, to be something else, by means of social media and ceaselessly fleeting trends. Stumbling upon the right corner of Pinterest or courtesy of TikTok algorithm is enough for one to wander into a wardrobe of personalities to adopt. 


Cosy autumn downtown girl

Manic pixie dream girl

Dark academia, light academia, chaotic academia

Pretentious, insufferable girl

Written by Kafka, written by Dostoevsky, by Camus, by Donna Tartt

I AM JUST A GIRL girl

Weird girl, but like, actually weird, like Dinner-in-America-weird, not in a glasses-off-glow-up-movie weird. A weird that you would not get


It is one thing to perform, to explore all our potential selves. But it is another thing to give oneself away to contemporary and ephemeral prettiness, to forget that beneath this autumn-downtown-pixie-dream-academic-weapon-core girl there is a person who is nothing as absolute as that and who can be absolutely anything.


The bliss of words is the freedom they gift us to flow like honey beyond the bounds of our bodies, to stain paper with droplets drawn from the worlds of our minds. But why is it that we choose to venture with this freedom to all places false, to those which fail to reflect the truths that lie at our core? Weaving stories and poetry and dreams is a marvellous thing, when it is done not out of fear of speaking from ourselves, but out of the confidence to momentarily leave ourselves, knowing we will not get lost, will not dissolve in the meantime. 


Whoever you are, may this encourage you to become more aware of the fluidity of your own image, to exaggerate and decorate and play with it, to step out into the fresh, cold morning with it in your hands, raising it before the eyes of a passerby or a beloved one or the Sun herself as if they were your audience, as if the damp pavement of the street was your stage, and witness the wondrous ways it will ripple and transform to charm, to create something new.


But, more importantly, to remember that such performance must have substance, solidity that can be provided only by someone with a secure connection to one’s inner world. The performance must bloom from our hearts, for it is only our hearts that ring true.



Note: All quotes used in this article were borrowed from the journals of Anaïs Nin.

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