In her journals Anaïs Nin writes of the speech of June Miller, Henry’s wife, her feverish talk with its “nervous flow.” A spinner of tales like the hysteric. “June was always telling stories; June with drugged eyes and a breathless voice.” She and Henry both colonize June, used June for their fictions. In Tropic of Cancer Henry Miller changes her name to Mona: “I sit down beside her and she talks—a flood of talk. Wild consumptive notes of hysteria, perversion, leprosy.”
