The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1966–1974

The irony the whole sequence built toward: the writer of the century's most private book became one of its most public figures. The volume records the machinery of late fame — the tours, the interviews, the mail in sacks, honorary degrees, election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters — and Nin's complicated pleasure in it, gratitude and exhaustion keeping close company. The young readers are the volume's warmest presence: the diary had waited two generations for its audience, and when it arrived, it arrived asking her to explain their own lives to them.

Because Nin died in January 1977 with the last years still unedited, the seventh volume is a posthumous assembly: Gunther Stuhlmann shaped it from the final journals, ending it in 1974 — before the illness that filled her actual last diaries, which she had wanted kept separate. Read against Volume One it completes one of literature's longest single arcs: the eleven-year-old writing an unsent letter to a vanished father, and the woman in the lecture hall sixty years later, asked by strangers how to live.

1966–1974: publication and its explosion; the tours — New York, Paris, London, campuses across America; the correspondence and the pilgrims; the succeeding Diary volumes appearing every few years to compounding fame; friendships old and new attending the late seasons; and the diary's own strange new condition — a private practice continued in public, its keeper now describing rooms full of people who had read her descriptions of empty ones.