By the time I was introduced to the works of Anaïs Nin in the year 2000, her career had already endured multiple tumultuous periods, both during her lifetime and beyond. She died two years before I was born, in 1977. This saddened me, not having been able to share this earth with her even for a short while. I was twenty years old and living in the northwest with my boyfriend when he gifted me a paperback copy of Henry & June. I had just moved from Holland and was brand new in this country. From the cover, the book looked like a romance novel, not an obvious choice for me, the title set in curvy type, a foggy black-and-white photo of a couple under a bridge, engaged in… Wait, was that oral sex? At the time, I favored more heady books like Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides and Donna Tartt’s A Secret History. I wasn’t opposed to sex in literature, but I’d never been exposed to anything quite this racy before. My boyfriend told me about the film adaptation from 1990, ten years before, describing some pretty exciting sex scenes. He must have been trying to spice up our sex life. What he didn’t know is that, with this gift, he awakened in me a passion of a different kind: to become a writer.
The book depicted Nin’s affairs with both the author Henry Miller and his wife June, and the stories were certainly steamy, but after finishing the book, I was mostly drawn back to the subtitle: “from the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin.” Unexpurgated diary? What does ‘unexpurgated’ even mean? And who was this diarist, Anaïs Nin? To find out, I made my way to the nearest secondhand bookstore, and found the collection of Nin’s diaries in its entirety. I learned that Henry & June wasn’t in fact a novel, but a story derived from her diaries, something more memoir than novel, or something we might nowadays call auto-fiction. I learned that it wasn’t so much Nin’s erotica but the diaries that had made her career. This seemed significant. I didn’t yet wonder about all the reasons for this.
I had been keeping diaries all my life. My first one was a precious floral covered notebook complete with tiny padlock, a gift for my twelfth birthday. During my high school years, I wrote on anything I could get my hands on, scraps of loose paper and school notebooks. For some time, I favored the tiny books I found at the Asian trinket shop in Eindhoven, the nearest city to my small hometown in Holland. They were hard bound in satin of different colors, with faux leather corners, a string to keep track of the page. The appearance of the book inspired more serious writing, or at the very least, neater handwriting. Before heading to America, the mess of all of my diaries were packed away in the attic of my parents’ house back in Holland and took up a fair amount of space, something my mom reminded me of not infrequently. I’d never thought of my diaries as “material,” but at the same time, I hadn’t thrown them away either. When I came upon Nin’s diaries, naturally, I thought: Could I do that, too? Publish my diaries? Immediately followed by the question: Can diaries even be considered literature?
Nin’s earliest diary didn’t in fact begin as a diary in the traditional sense of the word, but a letter to her Cuban father, who deserted the family for a younger woman back in France when Nin was a child. Even though her father never read the diary, the writings weren’t a strictly private endeavor—it was written with an audience in mind, Nin’s father. Nin’s mother moved her and her brother Joaquim from Paris to New York, by boat, and the letter was her attempt to lure her father back to her, describing in vivid detail the exciting journey across the ocean and the marvelous city of New York (in truth, she had a very difficult time adjusting). In the year 2000, reading her later diaries, I marveled at how eloquent and observant she was, certainly more so than I was in my own diary’s ramblings. Her writing seemed almost too polished to be a diary. Not that this bothered me. At the age Nin boarded a boat bound for America, I was borrowing books from the bibliobus parked behind my elementary school on Wednesday afternoons. Ironically, my favorite book was the fictional diary of a teenage girl named Loesje, published in the 1980s, typeset to appear handwritten, describing Loesje’s typical teenage horrors: growing breasts, getting her first period, and her annoying older brother who relentlessly teased her about all of it. It was a first-hand account of what was awaiting me as a pre-teen and, fictional or not, I gladly played along.
Nin famously sponsored and helped Henry Miller and other writers become successful novelists, but while she made the careers of other writers possible, for most of her career, Nin’s own writing was ignored and ridiculed. Nin’s background was rooted firmly in the surrealist movement of Europe with its deep symbolism and disdain for convention. The movement was officially consecrated in Paris in 1924 with the publication of the Manifesto of Surrealism by poet and critic André Breton, a close friend of Nin’s. Even though surrealism became an international intellectual and political movement, by the time Nin arrived in New York in the 1940s, the literary and art scene favored realism while Nin’s work was dreamlike and fantastical. The one piece of her literature that received any critical acclaim was her short-story collection Under a Glass Bell. The others were mostly mocked. The Partisan Review called her work “vague, dreamy, mercilessly pretentious” and “a great bore.”
When she grew tired of being rejected, Nin purchased her own printing press on MacDougal Street in New York, typesetting and printing four of her books by hand, each of them carefully crafted works of art, with whimsical illustrations by her husband Ian Hugo. The process of creating the books gave Nin immense pleasure. As both a graphic designer and as a writer, I admire her ability to control the entire process of the creation of the writings, from the content to the real-life object to hold and to share. It’s what has always drawn me to print design and the reason I was never interested in designing for the web.
Nin didn’t gain notoriety until her diaries were published, in the year of 1966. She was 63 years old. There were seven volumes spanning 50 years, again with beautiful cover art by Hugo and some photos inside of herself, operating her handpress in her MacDougal Street studio, and of peers like Frances Field and her paintings, even a watercolor by Henry Miller, inscribed: “To Anaïs, who witnessed the Genesis of the ‘Masterpiece’ and inspired all the other masterpieces, being herself a masterpiece. H.M. 1944.”
Unlike a day-to-day account, Nin’s diaries spanned longer periods of time, with chapter titles such as “Winter, 1939” and “January, 1941.” They contained letters and the expected anecdotes about her famous friends Henry Miller, Antonin Artaud, and Gore Vidal. Yet the bulk of the books is comprised of long, introspective passages about the nature of the self, which proved to be the diary’s biggest draw. It’s certainly what drew me. The set I purchased in 2000 was the second printing from 1994, with the iconic, albeit less exciting, book covers containing Nin’s elegantly pensive face with her famous penciled eyebrows in the bottom left corner, the type set in the modernist sans serif typeface she favored when setting type by hand on her own printing press.
The publishing of the diaries came at just the right time. This was the 1960s and Nin was the epitome of the liberated woman, turning her into a celebrated author and public speaker, finally enjoying widespread respect and admiration. With her stories of her multitudes of lovers, a lifestyle she not only survived, but still advocated for, was an inspiration for the women at the time. She was one of the first authors to write erotica from the woman’s point of view, was celebrated and became a sort of cult figure, someone to model one’s life after, holding salons in her Los Angeles home, young women (self-proclaimed “Ninnies”) sitting at her feet hanging on her every word. Nin received more mail than she could handle, which she considered not fan mail but love letters, vowing to reply to each and every one of them. She didn’t drink or do drugs. According to her publisher, fame was her addiction, but she herself insisted it was not her diary that was “her kief, hashish and opium pipe.” This was “her drug and her vice.”
Nin died of cancer in 1977 at the age of 73. The news of her death caused quite a stir when the Los Angeles Times reported her as being survived by her husband, Rupert Pole, while her obituary in the New York Times identified Ian Hugo, the illustrator of Nin’s books, as her husband. They were both right. After her initial move to New York with her family as a child, she had returned to France where, as a young woman, she’d married Hugo. The couple moved back again to New York in the 1940s in order to escape the Second World War. Famously promiscuous, thirty years into her marriage to Hugo, she followed a handsome Hollywood actor to Los Angeles, with whom she started a relationship. Rupert Pole was related to the Lloyd Wright family and in order to convince Nin to stay, he had a house built for them in Los Angeles in the iconic mid-century modern style. But Nin refused to divorce Hugo. For the next twenty years, Nin maintained two marriages, one on the east, the other on the west coast, traveling back and forth between husbands every six weeks, never letting on about her double life. Only a few close friends, her editor and publisher were aware of Nin’s double life, and in order to keep her facts straight, she kept a ‘box of lies,’ containing her various dates and whereabouts.
Despite the popularity at their publication in 1964, the authenticity of Nin’s diaries has always been always a source of skepticism amongst readers. Even though it was obvious from the fact that the diaries spanned longer periods of time instead of a day-to-day account, Nin insisted throughout her life that her diaries were absolutely unedited. The illegibility of this statement deepened when her unexpurgated diaries were published posthumously by Rupert Pole, her husband in Los Angeles. She had gone to great lengths to protect her husbands and friends in the original diaries but had also covered up many secrets of her own. The uncensored diaries were published in the form of several books, Henry & June being one of them. According to Pole, it had been Nin’s wish to publish them, but only after her death, however, there is disagreement amongst her family and friends about this. Her brother Joaquim for instance was horrified at seeing his sister’s most private writings published. Her friends were conflicted—on the one hand, they regretted seeing their friend’s secrets exposed, on the other, they were glad to see this piece of important literature being shared with the world. I don’t think it can be disputed that Nin’s diaries are indeed important works of literature, but what elevates this work, and any diary for that matter, from mere documentation to literature? For certain it has something to do with being able to create beautiful language. But it seems that that’s not all. I believe it’s the ability to connect one’s own personal experiences to the larger world that elevates the personal to the universal. Nin speaks of her own inner emotions but the reader, who sees herself in Nin’s writing, gains perspective, inspiration, courage, whatever is needed. I believe that in order to make that connection, to reach that universal level, a certain amount of self-reflection is needed. The writer can’t simply recount experiences (this happened, then that..), she has to make meaning out of it. She has to learn from her experiences and share those lessons with the reader, so she in turn can make her own.
During the early 1940s in Paris, as a way to support her friend Henry Miller, Nin wrote erotica for a private client for a dollar a page. Even though she didn’t write these pages with the intention of publishing, they later became the famous book Delta of Venus. While in Paris a few years ago, I made a special trip to the famous bookshop Shakespeare & Company and bought a copy, published in 2000 as one of Penguin’s Modern Classics. It’s one of my most treasured books. Like Henry & June and Little Birds, Delta of Venus remained unpublished during Nin’s lifetime out of concern that if she started publishing erotica, she would never be remembered for anything else. Nin only consented to publishing it posthumously in order to provide for her husbands after her death. In a way, she was correct in her suspicion. The book of erotica became her first bestseller and emblematic of her writing legacy.
Just a year after the second reprint of the diaries, in 1995, Nin’s hard-earned fame was shattered when award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair published Anaïs Nin: A Biography. After reading all of Nin’s uncensored diaries, Bair concluded Nin was “essentially amoral,” vilifying her for her life choices, not just the affairs and bigamy, but for an illegal abortion as well as the short-lived affair with her father after their reunion when Nin was in her thirties and he in his fifties (the affair inspired her novel House of Incest). Thirty years ago, subjects like incest were as controversial as they are now. The idea of Nin being widely regarded as an inspirational figure—rather than a fraud or, as one memorable headline called her, “a monster of self-centeredness whose artistic pretensions now seem grotesque” suddenly seem ludicrous. If Nin were alive today, these things about her past would be career-cancelling.
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Ever since I moved to the U.S. from my childhood home in Holland, my native language has been a way for me to write freely on trains and in public parks, my secrets safe from unwanted eyes. I’ve had the luxury of leaving my diary laying around my home, as no one would be able to read it even if they dared open it. This has provided me with an immense sense of safety to express myself. Nin said of the act of writing: “No matter what disintegrating influence I was experiencing, the writing was an act of wholeness.” My diary served a similar purpose; it has always been my way of exploring the self in relation to the world. But the question remains: Is it considered literature? Perhaps this depends on whether or not the work was edited and for what purpose. When I started the process of writing my memoir, this meant translating the diary entries from Dutch to English, then editing and shaping it into something cohesive. My diaries in their current state are mere documentation. I don’t believe they become literature until they have gone through the rigor that literature requires. Not only in terms of cohesiveness but with a message that reaches beyond the people who know me personally and resonates with a wider audience, the message resonating universally.
When I first started my journey as a writer, I wasn’t sure if I could really call myself a writer—yet. A dear friend reassured me quite simply that someone who writes is a writer, thereby giving me permission to take the title for myself. A published writer is an author. What does that say about literature? Does this mean writing doesn’t become literature until it is published, able to reach that universal audience? If a long-lost letter written by Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo was found today, it would surely be considered literature, perhaps even if it consisted of three words. This would suggest that only famous artists or writers’ work is considered literature, or whatever it is they have created, is considered art or literature. A letter by an unknown person would most likely not fall into the literature category. Unless perhaps the letter was historic, a window into a different time. What is considered literature or art will always be circumstantial.
As an introspective person, another aspect of my new hero I appreciated was her interest in psychology and the use of psychotherapy as a way toward self-discovery. While Nin went into treatment with Otto Rank, one of Freud’s closest colleagues, I enrolled into a humble Psychology 101 class at the community college in Seattle in order to feed my interest in psychology. Nin famously had an affair with Rank during her time in therapy with him. In her diaries, she would continue analyzing herself, something I did as well. I distinctly remember learning the English term “anxiety,” a word I didn’t understand well at the time except for its relationship to the Dutch word angst, which means “fear.” I didn’t feel scared per se, but as a foreigner in a new country, and a young person living on her own for the first time, there was a sense of stress. Now with every tool at my fingertips in the form of an iPhone, when translating the English term ‘anxiety,’ Google Translate comes back with ongerustheid, meaning uneasiness, or a state of worry. The English word stress translates to spanning, meaning tension. For me, worry is a common state of being to this day, and in those early days, I often felt terribly homesick as well. I remember once being at a party at a friend’s house as the only non-American. Every cultural reference was over my head and I didn’t understand any of my friends’ jokes. I ended up sneaking out of the party and running home to my apartment, crying. Nin’s words spoke directly to my heart: “Something is always born out of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them.” My American boyfriend could only relate so much and so I was left to console myself, with my diary as my trusted place to do so.
Like Nin, I surrounded myself with artists, some European, others from different parts of the U.S., trying my best to recreate the kind of life Nin enjoyed. There was the carefree, bohemian café life of 1920s Paris. New York in the 1940s with its European refugee artists bringing modernism, joining the abstraction of the old world with the spirit of the new. The Beat Generation of the 1950s on both coasts: San Francisco's North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New York City's Greenwich Village. 1960s Los Angeles where, unlike in New York, there was no art scene yet to speak of, so artists had the freedom to do what they wanted. The salons held in Los Angeles by the feminist artist of 1970s. Now here I was on Capitol Hill in Seattle in the early 2000s, meeting up with my designer, printmaker, photographer and choreographer friends, discussing life and art for hours over coffee and drinks at our favorite spot Café Septième. On Saturdays we would get dressed up, pile into the one car we owned among all of us, and go on road trips, one of us with a perpetual photo camera around his neck, ready for an impromptu photo shoot at a junk store.
There were the obvious similarities: Nin and I both moved from Europe to the U.S. in our teens, both longed for Europe even as we grew roots in America. Even our first names were similar. The duality Nin describes in her work, of being from two places, made me feel less alone in those early days as an immigrant. It resonates still. At the time, I wasn’t aware of Nin’s “secrets.” She was clearly promiscuous, something she was modeled by her father, and bisexual, but this wasn’t earth-shattering to me.
A little glimpse into the way I was raised. I remember an instance of some gossip in my hometown about a woman who apparently undressed herself in front of her bedroom window every night before going to bed. She had been spotted by a few people walking their dogs and quickly became the talk of the town. When the news made it to our house, I was ready to mirror whatever opinion my mother would surely have about this. She shrugged. Not only did she shrug, I remember her saying something along the lines of “Well, to each her own. If this woman likes to undress in front of her window, who is she hurting?” By the look on her face, it felt almost like my mom was taking notes for herself, but then again, she wasn’t the kind of woman who would indulge publicly this way. Furthermore, it seemed to me that my mom was in fact suppressing a full-on compliment along the lines of “Hell, good for her!” I didn’t realize until recently how rare it is to be raised by parents who try hard to live by the ideals of nonjudgment. They’re quiet about it, but it’s very much there. Commenting on someone’s body shape was considered gauche, and not just in front of that person, it wasn’t done out of their earshot either. I grew up with two older brothers and a younger sister, but teasing wasn’t acceptable in our house. Respect was paramount. I’ve carried this with me until this day. In light of this, I’m not sure knowing Nin’s full story would have made much of a difference in my opinion of her, even at age twenty. Despite the fact that my boyfriend and I were in a committed relationship, I was much more in line with the liberated woman of the 1960s, and so were my friends. I guess I took after my parents. They were not without boundaries, mind you, and neither was I. Extra-marital affairs were not taken lightly by any of us (again, respect) but then again, if someone else partook in them, who were we to judge? I won’t pretend I wasn’t shocked when, in my research for this essay, I discovered that Nin not only pined after her father from a young age but had an affair with him as an adult (and perhaps even aborted his child). But what interests me, is what led her to do those things, and perhaps more importantly, what she created out of these life experiences. How she turned it into art. Again, taking the personal to the universal.
Nin started writing in English when she was seventeen years old. It took me until I was in my thirties to do so, even though my spoken English was always strong. My diary is still written strictly in Dutch. Besides the handy disguise, it’s my way of staying connected to my mother land. It’s also my internal language, the language I use to speak to myself—written, or via iPhone voice recordings—as well as on the phone with my family. Nowadays, I’m studying in a graduate program, so once I become comfortable sharing my writing with my teachers and peers, I switch to English, usually only after I’m finished processing my feelings and ideas, in Dutch.
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We cannot overlook the most famous diarist, who also happens to be from the Netherlands. Shockingly, I was not required to read Anne Frank’s diary in school. In fact, I didn’t read it until last year, at the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic quarantine. As I was getting used to being home every day with my husband and teenage son, it seemed fitting to read the experience of a family navigating a small space together, albeit under much more dire circumstances. The Diary of Anne Frank, or Het Achterhuis, the name of the family home, is decidedly part of my national history, a book every Dutch person is aware of. Strangely, growing up, I don’t remember the book being discussed, in school or at home.
It’s hard to imagine the reality of my people during this time—forty years before I was born and during Nin’s years of coming of age—the war, the occupation by the Nazi’s, hunger and poverty. Cities like Rotterdam, and my beloved city of Eindhoven, were bombed to bits. There is very little post-war architecture left. One thing Holland is known for (and is proud of) is the fact that the Dutch hid many Jews during WWII. Holland has traditionally been touted as “the land of the tolerant”—we advocated for gay rights before many other countries, cannabis has been legal since the 1970s, and in general, the Dutch rule had always been to ‘live and let live:’ it’s not anyone’s business to interfere with or judge what anyone else does. During WWII, the Dutch felt it was their duty to do the right thing, compelled to become part of the resistance and help the plight of the Jewish people. There had been a moral core to my country, something I grew up feeling strongly. Despite the small size of our country, we have made significant change in the world, usually (not always) for the better. This notion is no doubt naïve and nostalgic, but if I’m honest, what I experienced most while reading Frank’s diary, was good old-fashioned pride in my people. I couldn’t believe that the Gies family risked their lives to hide the Franks, in such a very Dutch matter-of-fact way. It’s just “what people did.”
Some years ago, my elderly friend Frances invited me to an event at Marist College. The speaker of the event, the Dutch Jewish wife of a college friend of Frances, had been a “hidden child” in the Netherlands during the war. Expecting raving accounts of the woman’s experience taken in by this generous Dutch family risking their lives to save that of an innocent Jewish girl, I was met with something else entirely. The speaker shared stories of trauma of an unexpected kind: of sexual abuse at the hands of the people supposedly saving her. A crude awakening to the fact that, no matter how much we want it to be true, no person or country is morally squeaky clean.
The fact that I didn’t read Anne Frank’s Diary as a child may be because I’m two generations removed from the war, or that my family is from the country, an area largely removed from the ruins of the WWII. Both sets of my grandparents lived through the war but survived unscathed. The area where my family is from was comprised of mostly farms and fields at the time—there simply wasn’t much for the Germans to conquer or gain in the country. Growing up, I thought of Frank’s book as just another old book on a library shelf and didn’t give it much thought, let alone the fact that it was a diary, the inner thoughts of a young girl. The fact that Frank was a Jewish girl from the north whereas I was Catholic southern girl, and we lived out vastly different parts of Dutch history made the gap wider still. Still, as an adult I’m shocked that Frank’s diary wasn’t part of my high school curriculum. To be honest, I didn’t encounter a single Jewish person until I moved to the United States. Sadly, I didn’t see the significance of how this book came to be one of the most famous works of literature of all time. The personal thoughts of a ten-year-old Dutch girl translated into a multitude of languages—literature.
Now that I finally got my hands on a copy of the diary (in our native Dutch, of course), what I noticed in Frank’s writing was not just the wonder of the very existence of the document, but the banality of her thoughts—of course she was going to have crushes and complain about her parents, she was a pre-teen! What struck me most was her intention, the intention for her diary to be published. While it was certainly a private account of Frank’s inner world, publishing it was not, unlike perhaps in the case of Nin’s uncensored diaries, a violation of her privacy. She intended for the diary to become public domain, because she couldn’t be certain that she would live to tell her story. Despite her young age, she was aware of the fact that she was creating an important document, something that needed to be saved and shared with the world, something to learn and grow from. And indeed, it was saved, by the people who hid the Frank family. It was Miep Gies, the brave matriarch of the family, the wife of Anne’s father’s employer, who managed to do just that. After the family was captured by the Nazi’s and it became time to clear out Het Achterhuis, Miep spotted Anne’s little red diary on her writing table. She slipped it in her apron before the Nazi’s got their hands on it and kept it hidden under her bed for years. Not until the war was over did she finally hand it to Otto Frank, Anne’s father and the only surviving member of the family. Otto Frank published his daughter’s diary in 1947 and founded the Anne Frank Foundation, preserving Het Achterhuis and the legacy of Anne and the family to this day.
There is an inherent audacity to insisting that your work be out in the world. Frank was most likely too young to realize the gravity of what she was asking Gies to do, to risk her life saving the diary in order to get it published. She was aware however of the fact that she may not survive and the fact that her diary was an important document of a pivotal time. This would take tremendous gall from anyone, let alone a ten-year-old. Arguably, if Frank had not been Jewish and been captured and killed by the Nazi’s, her diary would likely not have become internationally renowned literature. Therefore, when regarding diary as literature, circumstance is indeed hugely important. Had she survived and lived an ordinary life, what would have become of her diary? It most likely would have stayed in the drawer of her writing table, much like my own.
Bruce Springsteen said it best. During a conversation between him and Barack Obama, on the podcast Renegades, I found myself yelling “Yes!” to my Bluetooth speaker. It was exactly what I was trying to explain to my husband at dinner the previous night. To paraphrase, Springsteen said that as an artist, or a politician, you have to have two things going for you. On the one hand, you must have the egotism to believe that you have a voice and a point of view that is worth being heard … by the whole world. Springsteen laughed at the audacity. He then went on to say that on the one hand you need that type of egotism, and yet on the other hand, for it to be true, to have the impact, you have to have tremendous empathy for others. Obama butted in to say it took not egotism, but megalomania, claiming: “You start off with ego, but at some point, you empty out and become a vessel for the hopes and dreams of others. You become a conduit for them.” At a young age, Springsteen decided to write music about his (self-proclaimed) red neck hometown in New Jersey, as a way to talk about America with all its flaws and its beauty. Unlike myself, he didn’t leave his town in order to create his art, in fact, he remains there to this day. Like Springsteen, Obama always felt like an outsider, but in a different way. He always looked different from everyone around him, including his own (white) mother and grandparents. The unusual childhood he experienced (of being raised by white people and living in places like Hawaii and South-East Asia) gave him a different kind of outsider perspective. Like Springsteen, he wanted to use this perspective to inspire and serve this country.
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Reading these iconic diaries, the initial gain was simple affirmation that there is a purpose to keeping a diary. The act of documenting one’s life holds a certain power. It’s a tool for self-therapy, for self-reflection, and for healing. It’s a tool for remembering, for learning from mistakes. I can’t tell you how many times I have run into an issue (with a friend, parenting, what have you) and remembered having been in a similar situation a year at some point before. All I have to do is flip back to those pages, read my experience from that time and figure out the best way forward. I love my diary’s pragmatism and at the same time, its romanticism. Because it is, of course, entirely unnecessary to document one’s life. One can live a perfectly satisfying life without keeping track of every thought or emotion. Most people do. Most people don’t plop themselves down onto their beds, pen and diary at the ready, making sure they to write down every last detail immediately after the experience they just had, the way Nin did. They simply live their lives. But I find that the diary, the habit of repeating back to myself the events of my life, helps me to experience life on a deeper level. Not only that, I have come to regard my diaries ‘material’ – it’s truly the source material for everything I create. This too I have in common with Nin. The reason I write non-fiction is because I find real life inherently fascinating. There are so many stories to be plucked directly from life, one never has to make up a single thing! What I aspire to gain from keeping my own diary, is to always have material to draw from, not only to continue learning from past mistakes but to remember—the joys, the heartbreak, the soaring heights and the painful crashes.
Under what circumstance can diaries be considered literature rather than historical documents or artifacts or private records? In Frank’s case, it has to do mostly with historical significance. The diary was elevated from document to literature because of what happened to Frank, which represented the flight of millions of other Jewish people who were killed during the Holocaust. In Nin’s case, the diaries spoke to a generation of people, the liberated women of the 1960s, who were living out the ideals of “free love.” Perhaps diaries are simply considered literature when the writing resonates with enough people to make publishing worthwhile. Then again, isn’t that the case for any kind of writing, or art for that matter, not just diaries?
But then there is the element of the actual language. If a diary isn’t beautifully written, observant, reflective, it isn’t going to resonate with readers. It has to be written in a way that is compelling, even a story as extraordinary as that of a Jewish girl during WWII. If Frank hadn’t been an observant person and writer, the diary still wouldn’t have been considered literature. It can’t simply be an account, a tallying up of events, it has to be made into a compelling story. If there is interest beyond the immediate family—interested in the writer’s story because it’s partly her own—if it transcends the personal and becomes universal, that’s when writing becomes literature, that’s when a private song makes it onto a Spotify playlist to be played by millions of people, that’s how a private doodle becomes a New Yorker cartoon, or a piece of art on a museum wall. It’s like Springsteen said: Art happens when the ego makes way for empathy, the private for the universal.
I wonder if Nin and Frank knew intellectually that their work was important, or if it was a gut feeling. Was it purely megalomania, or did the feeling transform into something universal? Whichever way the work came to be, we all know the end result of their diaries: both, in their own unique ways, became vessels for the hopes and dreams of others. And isn’t that exactly what literature is supposed to do?
