A Woman Speaks

The lecture circuit was Nin's real late-life genre. She was on the road for a decade — campuses, conferences, television — and the spoken Nin surprised people: warmer and funnier than the legend, patient with enormous audiences of the young, and expert at turning the questions of the moment (the women's movement most of all) back toward her lifelong subjects of inner growth and creative discipline. Her relationship to feminism was genuinely complicated — she was claimed and criticized by it in the same seasons — and the talks here show her negotiating that embrace in real time.

Evelyn J. Hinz, her chosen critic, assembled the book from recordings with Nin's cooperation, organizing by theme rather than chronology. Published in 1975, it caught the last years of her speaking life and outlived them; for many readers it remains the most approachable Nin — the doctrine of the diaries and essays, delivered conversationally, with the audience in the room.

Edited talks and exchanges grouped by theme: the diary as a discipline of self-creation; creativity and the refusal of despair; women's development and the movement's questions, answered in her own key; relationships, dreams, and the psychology of growth; and the question-and-answer sessions where the era's audiences met her directly. Hinz's arrangement keeps the spoken cadence — the book reads as an evening with the late Nin.