Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" - The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932)
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Read in October, 2006
How does one review published diaries? According to literary merit? Though Anais Nin is a beautiful, insightful writer, I feel strange talking about her "writing style" when discussing a section of her journal. What I will talk about instead is the way that books often come into your life at a time when you need them. It happened to me once with 1984 (when I needed to crystalize exactly why writing was so important to me), then again with Everything is Illuminated (when I needed to be ...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in June, 2007
Henry and June is the type of journal that makes me want to highlight passage after passage...since journals so often have the types of personal reflections that are hard to achieve in pure fiction.
I did get bored with it fast, though. Maybe because after the first few instances of lust, jealousy, psychoanalysis, and then more lust, jealousy, and psychoanalysis, it was pretty much the same events and observations repeating themselves in different forms. But then again, journals aren’t sup...more
I did get bored with it fast, though. Maybe because after the first few instances of lust, jealousy, psychoanalysis, and then more lust, jealousy, and psychoanalysis, it was pretty much the same events and observations repeating themselves in different forms. But then again, journals aren’t sup...more
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recommends it for:
artists and desperate suburbanites
Think Madame Bovary without the rat poison. In the early 1930's - well before the heyday of the women's movement, Anais Nin could have listened to society's dictates of what a woman should do with her life. Instead, she lived fully on her terms. A sensualist, a feminist, a lifelong diarist; life and art always in concert. If the literal truth in her writing is, at times, questionable - as it is in most works of art - one truly knows that the opening paragraph of "Henry and June," an ea...more
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Read in April, 2008
Having first read this book at the age of 22, I have to say that my perspective on it 7 years later is dramatically different. I did not experience the profound liberation that I did when reading Henry & June the second time around. I once considered Nin to be a strong, sexually heroic figure, but now my opinion is that, during this time of her life, she was mostly confused, self-destructive and pawned her behavior off on the idea of naivity. Don't get me wrong, I feel that the love she expe...more
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Read in November, 2007
I should have this book 9 years ago.
"Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones." She later writes "The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure." Interesting.
"Afterwords I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He und...more
"Physical experiences, lacking the joys of love, depend on twists and perversions of pleasure. Abnormal pleasures kill the taste for normal ones." She later writes "The love of only one man or one woman is an enclosure." Interesting.
"Afterwords I pointed out to him how he had prevented all of us from living, how he had caused a living moment to pass him by. I was ashamed of his optimism, his trying to smooth things out. He und...more
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Read in October, 2007
While reading this I was thinking that anais is a narcissistic bitch, which i don't really necessarily hold against her. i'm sure it makes reading her journals more interesting than it would be otherwise. on one hand she comes off as so egotistical, spending the majority of her pages on how wonderful other people think she is. "oh, you are so beautiful... you are so wonderful... i love you more than i could ever love another woman... you are everything to me..." so on and so forth. on ...more
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Read in August, 2007
I just started reading this last night and can NOT put it down. It's great. It's fascinating to read of Nin's famous sexual awakening. I'm not sure I'm reading THE DIARY in order....I couldn't find the original V1 on my library's shelf, so I grabbed this one and also INCEST, both of which were expurgated from the original published in 1966 because Nin didn't want the people who she was writing about who were still alive to feel weird when the public read about their adventures. So I guess si...more
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Read in May, 2000
recommends it for:
bohemians everywhere
What have I learned from Henry and June? I have learned that if I am going to have a flaming affair with Henry Miller, to avoid the crap out of his narcissistic, borderline-personality wife June. But that would be a fairly boring diary. After all, what's a diary about 30s Paris without a highly charged emotional and sexual menage?
28 year old Anais Nin yearns for creative and sexual awakening. Her eight year marriage to Hugo Gullier has become stale. Enter, Henry Miller, stage left. Henry is...more
28 year old Anais Nin yearns for creative and sexual awakening. Her eight year marriage to Hugo Gullier has become stale. Enter, Henry Miller, stage left. Henry is...more
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I was very curious about Anais Nin after I saw the movie Henry and June, it was worth the read.
From the Publisher
Drawn from the original, uncensored journals of Anais Nin, Henry and June is an intimate account of a woman's sexual awakening. It covers a single momentous year - from late 1931 to the end of 1932 - during Nin's life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. She fell in love with June's beauty and Henry's writing and, soon after June's departure for New York, beg...more
From the Publisher
Drawn from the original, uncensored journals of Anais Nin, Henry and June is an intimate account of a woman's sexual awakening. It covers a single momentous year - from late 1931 to the end of 1932 - during Nin's life in Paris, when she met Henry Miller and his wife, June. She fell in love with June's beauty and Henry's writing and, soon after June's departure for New York, beg...more
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Read in May, 2008
recommended to Jamie by:
Gregoryrecommends it for: Nin fans, diary fans, those interested in the bohemian lifestyle or erotic writing
Anais Nin's "Henry and June" is a fascinating glimpse into one woman's erotic awakening. Her writing style is absolutely stunning and it's still almost bizarre to imagine someone writing about these moments and salacious details in the 30s--quite a brazen statement of identity. For a diary, "Henry and June" reads like a developed novel; it makes me want to kick up my own journal writing a notch or million. My only criticism of it would be that (and this is also because it's...more
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Read in January, 1997
recommends it for:
creative souls, passionate lovers, voyeurs
The way in which Anais Nin writes in "Henry and June" is obsessive, cyclical, repetitive, poetic, and passionate. I think that the dizzying and obsessing of the sexual and emotional aspects of her life echo the inner thoughts of many. Nin's diaries have been questioned, but the validity of the historical facts should not deter anyone from reading this incredibly intimate and self analyzing text. Clearly it is about this one woman's perception of her daily life. Her inner struggles...more
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Read in October, 2008
recommended to Liz by:
Anna Wittel
On one hand, I didn't like this book: Anais Nin is full of shit. She rationalizes all her bad behavior and the behavior of all her half-assed lovers. She's clearly spoiled, a drama queen and not very mature or happy. And she's an author groupie.
On the other hand, as someone who keeps a diary, I don't blame her. There have been times where I have rationalized my own behavior to myself on paper, have explained away the shortcomings of the men in my life, and have wished that I could combin...more
On the other hand, as someone who keeps a diary, I don't blame her. There have been times where I have rationalized my own behavior to myself on paper, have explained away the shortcomings of the men in my life, and have wished that I could combin...more
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Lavish, sexy, captivating... I could go on throwing out adjectives all day, without doing proper justice to how poetic and compelling this book is. Nin’s descriptions are like being wrapped in satin.
The book’s central problem, unfortunately, is the same thing that makes it great in the first place: it’s real. Nin’s words come from an honest, uncensored place deep inside herself. This makes it a fascinating read, but also a frustrating one. There’s no real storyline; there ar...more
The book’s central problem, unfortunately, is the same thing that makes it great in the first place: it’s real. Nin’s words come from an honest, uncensored place deep inside herself. This makes it a fascinating read, but also a frustrating one. There’s no real storyline; there ar...more
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If you ever wondered what a bohemian lifestyle was like, you should read Anais Nin. I'm pretty sure that her journal was the only way she could keep straight which lover she saw on what day, what they talked about, and how "amazing" every sexual experience was. She really loved each of these men but what was amazing to me is that although she sensed their jealousy of her other lovers at times, she really didn't want to change her lifestyle. She seemed to truly believe that her willin...more
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This is a diary, yes, but it could have used more editing. Ms. Nin was uniquely talented with a pen and just a completely different kind of creature than I, so it is definitely interesting to read. It's just that she can repeat herself again and again. I would hate to compare my ridiculous diaries I kept when I was her age (19-20), but they tended to repeat themselves, as well. This is the nature of a diary because our lives aren't as linear as most plotlines in books or movies. It's just t...more
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Read in January, 2005
If you've ever had the desire to read someone's diary in search of juicy details, then this is a pretty good pick for you. Filled with description of Nin's sexual promiscuity, her deception of herself, her therapist, and her husband and also her addictive relationship with Henry Miller, this is a showcase of human nature and as close as one can get to answering "what do women want?"... at least in a weakened emotional state. You might not like Nin, you might find her weak or annoying...more
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Read in June, 2007
recommends it for:
memoir fans
The book as a journal of meeting someone new and exciting is spicier because she meets two people, a couple, and has an affair. Do I love this book? No. She is trying to sort out her feelings about this affair all through this journal. And Nin's feelings, when repeated over and over and over again, kind of start to sound like drivel that just won't quit.
The ending of this book disappoints on so many levels. There could have been either a torrid lesbian love scene, a triangle-bitch-'em s...more
The ending of this book disappoints on so many levels. There could have been either a torrid lesbian love scene, a triangle-bitch-'em s...more
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Read in January, 2008
It was more immature than I expected. Anais is all "oh, I love my husband as my buddy, dare I have an affair?" and then she meets Henry Miller and has tons of sex with him and she's all "oh, this is hot, sometimes I really enjoy it, I am now a sexual beast," and then she and Henry Miller dissect each other's writing and that's also apparently super passionate, and then his wife returns to Paris. She's clearly bright but it's a little like the embarrasingly earnest journals ...more
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Read in January, 2008
recommends it for:
victorian teenagers
my father once told me that the only part of anais nin's diaries that he found interesting were the sections about henry miller. my father has more patience than I. I had to stop reading this about eighty pages in because of the overwhelming urge to smack nin. she has the ability to look at the world in such a way that every glimpse is newer and shinier than the one before. but she herself is included in these observations and really, I just couldn't take anymore of her adolescent reassuranc...more
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
the curious
Nin never ceases to grab my attention. Her poignant honesty, admitted indiscretions and frequent exagerations brightly light every page. I enjoy her writing for all of these things. In Henry and June, she explores love and the mysterious ability to feel it, on myriad levels, with multiple people at the same time. Her "sedately" bipolar, creative genius shines freely throughout the book, the layers of which add daily confusion, and vivid color to her life. A grand glimpse into the...more
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book data (includes all editions)
avg rating (all editions): 4.03 (1419 ratings) avg rating (this edition): 4.04 (1152 ratings) number of reviews: 122
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