Mirages: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1939–1947

Mirages opens at the dawn of World War II, when Ana¯s 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, Ana¯s 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 Ana¯s 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.