Mirages
The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Anaïs Nin fled Paris, where she lived for fifteen years with her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, and ends in 1947 when she meets the man who would be “the One,” the lover who would satisfy her insatiable hunger for connection. In the middle looms a period Nin describes as “hell,” during which she experiences a kind of erotic madness, a delirium that fuels her search for love. As a child suffering abandonment by her father, Anaïs wrote, “Close your eyes to the ugly things,” and, against a horrifying backdrop of war and death, Nin combats the world’s darkness with her own search for light.
Mirages collects, for the first time, the story that was cut from all of Nin’s other published diaries, particularly volumes 3 and 4 of The Diary of Anaïs Nin, which cover the same time period. It is the long-awaited successor to the previous unexpurgated diaries Henry and June, Incest, Fire, and Nearer the Moon. Mirages answers the questions Nin readers have been asking for decades: What led to the demise of Nin’s love affair with Henry Miller? Just how troubled was her marriage to Hugh Guiler? What is the story behind Nin’s “children,” the effeminate young men she seemed to collect at will? Mirages is a deeply personal story of heartbreak, despair, desperation, carnage, and deep mourning, but it is also one of courage, persistence, evolution, and redemption that reaches beyond the personal to the universal.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This volume collects material that Nin (1903 1977) had excised from previous diaries in particular, volumes 3 and 4 while her husband and lovers were still alive. The diary opens at the beginning of WWII as Nin and her husband, banker Hugh Guiler, escape Paris for New York City, and ends in 1947 when she meets Rupert Pole, the one lover who satisfied her. At times desperate and suicidal, she finds life more fulfilling when it conforms to her dreams a series of mirages she conjures to avoid reality, the horrors of war, and an America she finds abysmally immature. Often in a state of semi-delirium where she finds herself drowning in her unconscious, she writes that she needs love "so abnormally" that "it all seems natural" to keep several relationships going at once, "all the one and the same love." Her lovers included Henry Miller, 17-year-old Bill Pinckard, Edmund Wilson, and dozens of others, including an emotionally charged, but physically unfulfilled, relationship with Gore Vidal. Whether or not one sees this work, as Houghton Mifflin did when they considered these diaries for publication in 1942, as "the ultimate in neurotic self-absorption," Nin fans will embrace the book's emotional intensity and sensuality.
