Anaïs Nin: Writing to Find Meaning in Life
By Nava Atlas | On February 23, 2016 | Updated January 6, 2025 | Comments (2)
Anaïs Nin (1903-1977) embodied the practice of writing as a grand passion and a path to delving deeply into the self. In this sense she foreshadowed the immediacy of today’s world of self-revelatory memoir and blogging.
Best known for her multi-volume Diary of Anaïs Nin, which became a touchstone of feminist thought, she also broke ground as a writer of female erotica, and was a splendid essayist as well. For Nin, writing was as necessary as breathing.
Of course, as her famous Diary series progressed, she became aware that she was writing not only for an audience, but for posterity. Still, her raw, honest diaries resonated with millions of women who felt she had awakened something in them. Here are some of the responses she got from readers:
“The Diaries wakened me, made me relive my life, enjoy it, find new aspects to dream about; you gave me a second life.”
“My world is richer because you have given me yours.”
“You taught me to be a woman of tenderness, affection and independence.”
“Your writings, your honesty, helped me accept myself as a person, a woman, an artist.”
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To find meaning
“Writing to me means thinking, digging, pondering, creating, shattering. It means getting at the meaning of all things; it means reaching climaxes; it means moral and spiritual and physical life all in one.
Writing implies manual labor, a strain on one’s conscience and an exercise of the mind … Yes, my life flows into ink! And I am pleased. For I can live others’ lives without incurring the danger of smothering my inner thought life.” (The Early Diaries of Anaïs Nin, 1921)
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Anaïs Nin in 1970; photo by Elsa Dorfman courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
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To create a world of your own
“Why one writes I can answer easily, having so often asked it of myself. I believe one writes because one has to create a world in which one can live. I could not live in any of the worlds offered to me — the world of my parents, the world of war, the world of politics.
I had to create a world of my own, like a climate, a country, an atmosphere in which I could breathe, reign, and recreate myself when destroyed by living. That, I believe, is the reason for every work of art.” (The Diaries, Volume 5)
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To transcend life and reach beyond it
“We write to lure and enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. We write, like Proust, to render all of it eternal, and to persuade ourselves that it is eternal. We write to be able to transcend our life, to reach beyond it.
We write to teach ourselves to speak with others, to record the journey into the labyrinth. We write to expand our world when we feel strangled, or constricted, or lonely … If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.
When I don’t write, I feel my world shrinking. I feel I am in a prison. I feel I lose my fire and my color. It should be a necessity, as the sea needs to heave, and I call it breathing.” (In Favor of the Sensitive Man and Other Essays, 1976)
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Anaïs Nin’s Diaries: From the Personal to the Universal
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To get better at self-expression
“I didn’t have any particular gift in my twenties. I didn’t have any exceptional qualities. It was the persistence and the great love of my craft which finally became a discipline, which finally made me a craftsman and a writer.
The only reason I finally was able to say exactly what I felt was because, like a pianist practicing, I wrote every day. There was no more than that. There was no studying of writing, there was no literary discipline, there was only the reading and receiving of experience…
So I would like to remove from everyone the feeling that writing is something that is only done by a few gifted people…You shouldn’t think that someone who achieves fulfillment in writing and a certain art in writing is necessarily a person with unusual gifts. I always said it was an unusual stubbornness.
Nothing prevented me from doing it every night, after every day’s happenings.” (“The Personal Life Deeply Lived” – a lecture, 1975)
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To fulfill a deep inner necessity
“…You don’t write for yourself or for others. You write out of a deep inner necessity. If you are a writer, you have to write, just as you have to breathe, or if you’re a singer you have to sing.
But you’re not aware of doing it for someone. This need to write was for me as strong as the need to live. I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived. It was a second life, it was my way of living in a more heightened way.” (“The Artist as Magician,” interview, 1973)
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To develop, grow, expand
“There was no ego in the Diary, there was only a voice which spoke for thousands, made links, bonds, friendships. All the clichés about self-absorption were destroyed. There was no one self. We were all one. The more I developed my self, the less mine it became. If all of us were willing to expose this self, we would feel neither alone nor unique.
I was so tired of the platitudes hurled at me. The two most misinterpreted words in the world: narcissism and ego. The simple truth was that some of us recognized the need to develop, grow, expand—occupations which are the opposite of those two words. To desire to grow means you are not satisfied with the self as it is, and the ego is exacting, not indulgent.” (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Volume Seven)
Your book is a wonder, and I dearly thank you for writing/assembling it! Bless you!
Oh my gosh, how did I miss answering this … so sorry! Than you so much, and so belatedly, Kelly.