A Review: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934

Title of Work: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931-1934
Author: Anaïs Nin
Format:
Published:
Started:
Finished: 2025-09-26\

Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 4/5

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Nin is a great writer and hung around some interesting, influential artists and innovators in her time. She kept a beautiful, narrative diary through most of her life, starting when she was a young girl.

Highly self-aware, reflective, sensitive. She constantly felt she was taking on the troubles of those close to her so that they could become more fully themselves yet often felt unseen as an artist.

This is a pretty long volume and only the first of seven (!?)

While I did enjoy it – I marked it all up with a bunch of inspired notes and annotations – I think there is only so much of another person’s diary one can bear. You get closer to this person, long dead in Nin’s case, until sometime in the middle there’s a peak of intimate empathy. Then, naturally, things start back toward the detached and unfamiliar. By the end I was getting a bit bored and ready to be back in my own life.

I felt similarly about Sedaris’s large volume of diaries.