In 1914 an eleven-year-old girl crossed the Atlantic with her mother and two brothers, bound for New York, and started writing to the father who had stayed behind. Joaquín Nin, a Cuban-Spanish pianist, had left the family. His daughter Anaïs began a notebook that was, in its first conception, a letter to him. She never sent it. She kept adding to it instead, for the next sixty-three years, until her death in Los Angeles in 1977.
That much is the standard version of the story, and it is accurate. UCLA Library Special Collections, which holds her papers, puts it plainly in the finding aid for the Anaïs Nin Papers: born in Neuilly, France, in 1903, moved to New York in 1914 after her father abandoned the family, “began her diary at this time and continued the diary throughout her life.”
What drew me to Nin was not the length of the diary. Plenty of the journal keepers profiled on this site wrote for decades. What is genuinely unusual is this: the same years of her life exist in print twice, in two different edited versions, both from her own manuscript, and the second restores what the first removed.
The seven volumes of The Diary of Anaïs Nin published between 1966 and 1980 are described by her own archive as expurgated. Her husband, the banker Hugh Guiler, was cut out of them completely, along with other living people. The versions that put him back only began to appear after he died. The UCLA finding aid states it in one flat archival sentence: “Unexpurgated volumes were published following the death of Hugh Guiler in 1985.”
That is not a scandal. It is a journaling problem, and a more interesting one than it first looks. Nin is often held up as the patron saint of total self-disclosure. The publication record says something more useful: a diary is not automatically the truth. It is a document its author keeps deciding how to shape.
1. The Diary Began Because Someone Was Gone
The first notebook was not a self-improvement project. It was addressed to a specific absent person, and it was written in French, which she used until she was about seventeen before switching to English.
This origin explains something about the diary’s texture that a lot of readers miss. Nin did not start writing to record events. She started writing to keep a relationship alive on paper after it had ended in life. The early diary is performative in the literal sense: there is a reader in mind, even an imaginary one, and the writing is arranged for him.
Most journals start this way, in my reading of them. Something ends, or something arrives, and there is more to say than there is anyone to say it to. That is not a lesser reason to begin than “I want to build a habit.” Our guide to what to write in a journal covers the mechanics; Nin supplies the motive.
Try this: Write your first entry as a letter to one specific person who cannot read it. A person who left, a person you have not met yet, a version of yourself ten years out. Do not send it. Notice how much easier the sentences come when they have somewhere to go.
2. The Same Months Exist in Two Books
Here is the concrete case, and it is the cleanest illustration of the whole problem.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One covers 1931 to 1934 and was published in 1966. It opens with a description of Louveciennes, the crumbling old house outside Paris where she was living. It contains Henry Miller, June Miller, Antonin Artaud, the psychoanalyst Otto Rank. It does not contain her husband. A reader in 1966 would have finished it without learning that the author was married.
Henry and June, drawn from the same manuscript diary covering 1931 and 1932, was published in 1986. Guiler is throughout it, as is her sex life, which the 1966 volume had almost entirely removed. The Anaïs Nin Foundation’s list of the diaries shows how far that second project ran: Henry and June, then Incest, Fire, Nearer the Moon, and later Mirages, Trapeze, The Diary of Others, and A Joyous Transformation, the last appearing decades after her death.
So two shelves of books, by one author, from one set of notebooks, telling the same years differently. Not a forgery on either side. Two edits.
For a journaler the implication is quietly destabilising. We tend to treat the journal as the place where the unedited truth lives, the backstage to the public self. Nin’s publication history shows that a diary can have a backstage of its own.
Susan Sontag’s notebooks make a related point from the other direction. Sontag wrote that in the journal she did not simply express herself but created herself, and that it offered an alternative to her daily life rather than a record of it. Both women understood the notebook as a construction site. Nin just happened to publish two of the buildings.
3. She Explained the Editing Herself, and the Reason Was Other People
The most valuable thing I found was not in a diary volume at all. It is an interview Nin gave at her home in Los Angeles in 1976, published in the New Orleans Review, in which she is asked directly how she decides what to publish and what to delete. Her answer is unglamorous and completely practical.
There are several problems determining what can go into the published diary, and people are sometimes hostile about what I’ve left out. They don’t understand that you have to consider two things very carefully: one is your own ethical standard which concerns the privacy of people who have confided in you, and the other deals with the publisher who demands that I receive permission before the portraits can be published.
Source: Anaïs Nin, interviewed by Jeffrey Bailey, “Anaïs Nin: Link in the Chain of Feeling”, New Orleans Review 5.2, from a conversation recorded in 1976.
She then gives an example. A storyteller friend from her Greenwich Village years appeared in the diary in a passage she thought affectionate and harmless. She sent it to him for approval, as her publisher required, and he asked her not to publish it, because details in the portrait would have cost him his job at the State Department.
The editing is really dominated by my own ethics because sometimes you can write something which doesn’t seem to be destructive but which can, in fact, be harmful.
Source: same interview, 1976.
That is the real reason the expurgated volumes look the way they do. Not vanity. Other people. A diary that runs for six decades accumulates other people’s secrets as a side effect, and Nin, who had every commercial incentive to publish the juicy version, spent years sending pages to her friends and cutting what they asked her to cut.
Most of us will never publish. The problem still arrives in a smaller shape: the journal on the shelf that someone else could open. If that thought has ever made you write more vaguely than you meant to, you are dealing with Nin’s problem at domestic scale.
Try this: Pick one entry you have softened because of who might read it. Rewrite it once, privately, with the real names and the real sentence, and then decide what to do with the page. The decision is yours. What matters is that you make it knowingly rather than letting the imagined reader edit you in advance.
4. What She Cut Was Not Small
It would be dishonest to make the editing argument without saying what was actually cut, so here it is, once, plainly, and then I will move on.
The unexpurgated volumes restore Nin’s marriage to Guiler; her explicit account of her sexual life, including the relationships with Henry Miller and with June Miller; an abortion in the sixth month of pregnancy; a sexual relationship, as an adult, with her father, published in 1992 under the title Incest; and, later, a second marriage to Rupert Pole conducted while she was still married to Guiler. The academic Alice Gorman, writing about reading Nin across a lifetime, describes finding the restored volumes shocking, and reasonable people disagree sharply about how to read them.
None of that is a journaling technique and I am not going to build a prompt out of any of it. It matters here for one reason: it establishes the scale of the gap. The 1966 diary was not lightly tidied. Substantial regions of a life were removed and put back thirty years later. Whatever conclusions a reader draws about Nin as a person, the editing question stands on its own.
5. She Wrote the Same Passage Twice, in Different Words
This is the detail that convinced me the editing was not an afterthought but part of how Nin worked. In an entry dated June 1934, published in Volume One, she wrote about her dependence on the diary itself:
This diary is my kief, hashish, and opium pipe. This is my drug and my vice.
Source: The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume One (1931-1934), entry dated June 1934, Harcourt, 1966. Wording and dating verified by Quote Investigator’s tracing of the passage.
Four years later the same idea reappears. In an entry dated October 1938, published in Volume Two, Nin describes returning to her houseboat and finding on her desk a page from the diary written long before, which still seemed to apply. She reproduces the passage, and it is not identical. “This diary is my drug and my vice,” it now begins, dropping the kief and the hashish, and the sentences that follow are rearranged. The same passage exists in the published diaries in two wordings, because she went back, reread, and wrote it again.
This translates directly into ordinary practice. A diary is usually sold to us as a one-pass instrument: write it down, close the book, move on. Nin treated hers as a text she returned to. Virginia Woolf’s diary worked similarly, a place she reread deliberately to see what her own mind had been doing. Rereading is where a journal stops being storage and starts being a working document.
Try this: Once a month, open the journal at random, find a passage that still applies, and rewrite it from scratch on today’s page without copying. What changes in the second version is the actual information.
6. Longhand, Every Morning, for Sixty Years
Asked in the same 1976 interview about her working habits, Nin gave an answer that any journaler can act on tomorrow.
Routine and discipline – that is, writing every day, and never erasing or crossing out – have been very important. I always write in the morning, usually between 7:30 and noon, and the afternoon I devote to correspondence and other miscellaneous things. I type when I work in the mornings, and only write longhand in the diary.
Source: same New Orleans Review interview, 1976.
Two things in there are worth separating. The first is the fixed morning block, the least surprising thing about her and the most transferable. The second is the deliberate split between tools: the typewriter for work meant for other people, the pen for the diary. She was using the physical act of writing as a switch between two modes of attention.
I find that more persuasive than any argument about handwriting and memory, because it is not a claim about neuroscience but about ritual. If your journal and your job live in the same application, the journal has to fight for a different frame of mind with no help from the environment.
I do this without ever having planned it. Free-flow writing gets a fountain pen. Work gets a gel pen that keeps up with how fast I need to get something down. The fountain pen is slower and slightly inconvenient, which is most of the appeal: it makes me feel like a person who writes rather than a person taking notes, and that small piece of theatre is enough to change what comes out. Novelty is doing the work here, not neuroscience. Nin’s version was a typewriter and a pen. Mine is two pens. The principle holds either way. The object tells you which mode you are in before you have written a word.
Also note “never erasing or crossing out.” Nin was not producing clean pages. She was refusing to interrupt herself, which is a different discipline entirely, and one of the more reliable ways to build a journaling habit that actually sticks. Sustained practice at this scale is rare but not unique: Thoreau’s journal ran to roughly two million words on much the same principle of showing up.
Try this: For two weeks, give the journal a different physical object than your work. Different notebook, different pen, different chair if you can manage it. You are not looking for a productivity gain. You are looking for the moment when picking up that specific pen starts to mean something.
7. The Container Changed When Her Life Did
Here is a detail from the archive that is one of the most practically encouraging things in the whole collection.
For the first three decades, Nin wrote in bound journals. Then, according to the UCLA finding aid, the form changed: “In 1946 her diaries took on a different form. Instead of the bound journals she traditionally used, the diaries became compilations of loose pages which included her diary entries interspersed with letters, ephemera, and other writings by Nin kept together in portfolios.”
The archivists note elsewhere that many of the diaries have letters, photographs, theatre programmes, clippings and memorabilia tipped and laid in. The diary stopped being a book and became a folder. Thirty-two years into a practice, she changed the format entirely, and the practice survived. That is worth knowing if you have ever felt that switching notebooks, or going digital, means you have broken something. Frida Kahlo’s illustrated diary and Walt Whitman’s notebooks and scrapbook material show the same instinct: the page absorbs whatever the life is producing, and if that stops fitting between two covers, the covers go. The question of a structured versus a free-flow journal is one you get to answer more than once.
Try this: If your current format has gone stale, do not push through it. Change the container and keep the practice. A folder of loose pages is a legitimate journal. Nin kept one for thirty years.
8. She Knew the Diary Was Shaped, and Said So
The most common criticism of Nin, then and now, is that the diaries are more literature than record. Some scholars have questioned how far they can be relied on as fact, and Nin blurred the line deliberately, drawing fiction out of the same material. Her 1976 interviewer put the accusation to her directly. Her reply was untroubled.
No, that doesn’t bother me. After all, I know the facts and I know that the facts are true. I also know that I see events in a lyrical or dramatic way and I feel that this is valid.
Source: same New Orleans Review interview, 1976.
She was more revealing a few paragraphs later, talking about the early diary:
I loved to make a drama out of everything, even the weather, and I allowed this to come through in the diary. If you do see things through the eyes of imagination, you should relate it.
Source: same interview, 1976.
There is a real caution in here as well as a permission. If you dramatise on the page, you are producing a document that is true to how you experienced something and unreliable about what occurred. Both can be worth having. They are not the same thing, and a journal that never distinguishes between them will mislead you when you reread it in five years.
Try this: In a heightened entry, draw a line at the bottom and add two or three sentences of flat, boring fact underneath. Times, names, what was actually said. You keep the intensity and you keep a way back to what happened.
9. Half the Quotes Under Her Name Are Not Quite Hers
One last layer, and it fits the theme too neatly to leave out. Nin is one of the most misquoted writers on the internet, which means her words have now been edited by strangers as well as by herself.
The famous example is “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” which circulates everywhere with her name attached and is routinely described as a line from her diary. It is not. It appears in her 1961 novel Seduction of the Minotaur, where a character reflects on what Nin’s own text calls “the talmudic words.” She was not claiming it as hers. Quote Investigator’s tracing of the saying follows it back through Talmudic attributions and several earlier writers.
I also went looking for “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage,” usually presented as a diary entry from 1941. I could not trace it to any published diary volume with a date attached. The sourced versions I found run “according to one’s courage” and lead to a quotation anthology rather than an edition of the diary. It may well be hers. I could not confirm it, and I would rather say so than pass it on.
This matters beyond pedantry. Nin spent decades deciding, carefully and often against her own interest, what her words would be when other people read them. The internet has undone a lot of that work in fifteen years. If you are going to put a line in your journal under someone’s name, it is worth two minutes to find out whether they wrote it. Our collection of journal prompts is a safer starting point than a quote graphic.
What Nin Actually Leaves Us
The temptation is to treat the unexpurgated volumes as the real diary and the 1966 volumes as the fake one. I do not think that survives contact with the evidence. Both sets came out of the same notebooks. Both were edited, one by her under constraint and one by her executor after those constraints were gone. Neither is raw.
What she leaves an ordinary journaler is a harder idea than “write everything down.” It is this: you are already editing. The entry you did not write, the name you left out, the feeling you rounded down because it looked melodramatic in ink, the notebook you would quietly bin before a house move. Nin’s two published diaries make that process visible at scale, because she did it twice and we can read both results side by side.
Knowing you are editing does not oblige you to stop. Nin did not stop, and her reasons were mostly good ones. It means the journal becomes something you are consciously making rather than something you assume is simply true. That is where most of the genuine benefits of journaling live, in the deciding rather than the recording.
Her papers are now at UCLA Library Special Collections, roughly twenty-five linear feet of them, still being processed as recently as 2025. The diaries held there stop in 1965; she kept writing for another twelve years. Her writing remains in copyright, and the estate that handles permissions for it is still, half a century on, deciding which of her words the rest of us get to see. The editing never really stopped.
I have never destroyed anything from my own journals. What I have done is quieter, and reading Nin properly made me recognise it: I write parts of mine in acronyms. Names mostly, and a few situations that would be obvious in full. It is not encryption. It would not survive a determined reader and it is not meant to. It is a deal I made with the part of me that writes differently when it pictures someone else holding the book. Rather than let that part soften the entry, I let it abbreviate. Nin cut her husband out of seven volumes. I use initials. Same instinct, several sizes down, and I think it was the right call, because the alternative was never more honesty. It was a vaguer entry.
Get careful pieces like this one. I spend the research time so you do not have to: primary sources, real archives, checked quotations, and one thing you can try in your own notebook. Subscribe to the newsletter and it arrives quietly.
Featured image: Anais Nin painted by Natashia Troubetskoia around 1932, the years both published versions of her diary argue over. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, CC0.
