21 February: Anaïs Nin

10 facts about the writer and diarist Anaïs Nin, born on 21 February 1903.

1. Her full name was Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell.
2. Anaïs Nin was born in Neuilly, France. Her father was a composer and pianist; her mother was a classically trained singer. When she was two, her parents split up and she moved with her mother to Barcelona and then New York.
3. She started keeping a diary at the age of eleven and kept it up until shortly before she died. Her early diaries were in the form of letters to her father, who had abandoned the family.
4. At 20, she married Hugh Parker Guiler, a banker, and moved to Paris with him. While she was living in Paris, she trained as a flamenco dancer. When her diaries were published, Guiler requested that any references to him be edited out, so we don't know much about their marriage.
5. She was a bigamist. When she was 44, she met actor Rupert Pole in a lift on her way to a party in New York. He was 16 years younger than she was. She ended up travelling to California with him and marrying him while still married to Guiler. Guiler didn't know anything about his wife's other husband until after her death. Nin's biographer Deirdre Bair believes Pole knew about Guiler, but "chose not to know". Eventually Nin had her marriage with Pole annulled, not because the relationship was over – she lived with him as if she was his wife until she died – but for legal reasons, because both husbands were claiming for her on their tax returns.
6. She was very interested in psychoanalysis, and studied it extensively. She even worked as a psychoanalyst for a while, but gave it up because she found she couldn't be objective about her patients and was “haunted” by them. The fact that she had sex with many of them on the couch probably didn't help.
7. Sixteen volumes of her diaries have been published, mostly in expurgated form. She also wrote novels and short stories and was one of the first women to write erotica. Her novels include Delta of Venus and Little Birds.
8. She wrote candidly in her diaries about her relationships and her life, including her father's abuse of her when she was nine, and an abortion.
9. She appeared in several films – she played Astarte in the 1954 Kenneth Anger film Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. She also appeared in Ritual in Transfigured Time and Bells of Atlantis. The latter was directed by her first husband.
10. She died of cancer at the age of 73.

See also: Quotes from Anais Nin

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