This little soundbite circulates dozens of times a day on the internet. In this case, the quote was taken from the novel Seduction of the Minotaur. At the time, Nin was an unfashionable underground author receiving almost no attention from the mainstream press. The internet has sort of turned her around. Alongside the proliferation of Nin quotes online, there is a growing sense of her relevance, too. Even better, authors and actors are bringing her back into the fold of acceptable reference points.
In her lifetime, Nin was an oddity: for one thing, she was a woman who wrote explicitly about sex from a female point of view. Her work included frank portrayals of illegal abortions, extramarital affairs and incest, all of which Nin wrote about without judging her female characters.
Yet even that comparison undercuts the strangeness and bravery of her work, for Nin was the first of her kind. And, like all truly unique talents, she was worshipped by some, hated by many, and misunderstood by most.
During her time in the public eye, Nin has been at least four different writers. First came Nin, the failure. Starting in the s, she was a fixture on the literary scenes of Paris and New York, known as a flamboyant personality, and better yet as a source of funding, thanks to her wealthy husband, Hugh Guiler. Henry Miller was the most famous recipient. She met him when he was middle-aged, unpublished and almost homeless. For no reason that anyone could see, Nin decided his profane rants were the work of a genius.
She paid his rent and living expenses for the next 10 years so that he could write, during which time he published Tropic of Cancer and became a darling of the avant-garde. Most were roundly mocked. In later years, this time spent battling it out on the margins would become part of her legend. Author and Nin fan Melissa Gira Grant recalls the impact of a photo of Nin at her press, printing her own work on a machine roughly twice her size:.
