Customer Reviews

Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anais Nin

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this reads like really good fiction...Anais opens up and analyzes everyday life to death....expresses emotions that everyone can relate to...as well as daring, very strange, and exciting situations in her life. very sensual....very deep views of relationships...very optimistic..never EVER DULL...always at maximum pitch

Recently I discovered on my wife's bookshelves the entire six volumes of Anais Nin's autobiography. I'd read Delta of Venus and Little Birds, and, a few years a go, quite by accident, I had the good fortune to live next door to Anais Nin's West Coast widower, Rubert Pole. One of my stories had just been bought to be the basis of a film and he had been the technical advisor for Henry and June, so we hung over the fence and talked about that. I thought he was a great guy. He was then about the age Anais Nin had been when she died, 73. So when I fouund the autobiography I read it all. It was wonderful, a great, marvelously detailed description of an entire era that stretched from 1934 Paris through the acid days in LA.
But it was missing the naughty bits, and Ms. Nin had lived a remarkably naughty life. After her death, at her urging, Rupert midwifed four volumes of the personal stuff. I'm reading the third now. Henry and June is the first. It is marvelous. It takes the reader inside the thoughts and feelings of this brilliant unabashedly lusty woman. At this point I feel I know her probabaly better than I have ever known anybody, because this is as complete a record of thoughts and feelings as is possible in words. In some ways I feel I know her better than she knew herself, because, as she admits, rereading some of her old diaries, events are not recorded as she remembers them, but as they actually happened, in her experience. This does not pretend to be an objective account. This is her life as she saw it.
Sometimes in Incest, and to a lesser extent, in Fire one wants to say, "Hey, get over yourself." These books provide deep insight, but some of her writing is rationalization for some pretty nasty behavior. I feel it's best to just experience, and try not to judge. One fact is indisputable. These books give you a ride like no other. If you have the time it's worth reading them all.
I plan to finish these, read some of her novels that cover the same territory, and perhaps go on to Henry Miller's novels that also cover those events. There are few such opportunites available to get inside the lives of fascinating people and the era they lived in.

This is among Anais' best works, possibly the very best. It describes the beginning of her multiple love lives and her collaboration with Henry Miller. Since she had already published what she could in her lifetime, these Unexpurgated Journal of Love volumes are largely her emotions and sexual feelings.

Very different from anything I've ever read. This may be due to the fact that it is a journal. Anais Nin is describing her day and her thoughts in a level of candor that I've never experienced except inside my own thoughts. In doing so, she has provided a woman's point of view in the 1930's that was very surprising to me. I am now into the second book, Incest, and her adventurous life is continuing.