The Diary of Others: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin, 1955-1966

The Diary of Others is the penultimate volume of a series of Anaïs Nin’s unexpurgated diaries, which began with Henry and June (1986).

When The Diary of Others opens, Nin, at age fifty-two, has recently entered into a bigamous marriage with the handsome forest ranger Rupert Pole in California, while her legal husband of thirty years, the faithful banker Hugh (Hugo) Guiler is unaware in New York. The first part of the diary, which is called “The Trapeze Life,” details Nin’s complicated efforts to keep each husband unaware of the other as she jetted between them, a process she likened to a bicoastal “trapeze.” At the same time, few publishers were interested in her feminine and introspective fiction, and she considered herself a failed writer. However, she was keeping a diary she had begun at age eleven, and she began to realize that the diary itself was her most important work—but she wondered how she could publish it when it included numerous lovers, incest, and abortion without harming those she loved, which is the subject of the second portion of this volume, called “Others.” The Diary of Others ends with the publication of the first volume of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which propelled Nin to critical and cultural fame at the age of sixty-three.