This volume completes the psychological journey of one of the truly remarkable women of our century. In addition to its profound insights and its many portraits of both the famous and the unknown, it is of prime interest as a record of Anais Nin's phenomenal rise to international celebrity in the 1960s and 70s. Her example of self-liberation wins a vast, dedicated following among young people and feminists. After decades of exclusion from the literary establishment, she finds herself showered with praise, invitations, love. "The sound of opening doors," she writes, "is deafening!" Fame exacts its price, she is soon to discover. Interviews, lectures, correspondence-a "dialogue with the world"-begin to crowd out her diary writing and her private life. She grows uneasy, too, about the public Anais, idealized by admirers, attacked by militant feminists. Her taxing itinerary takes her to Germany, France, and England, as well as to the campuses of America. Respite comes during "fairytale" trips-to Japan, Cambodia, Thailand, Tahiti, Morocco-which inspire some of the richest, most lyrical passages in the book. It is a time of deep personal and artistic fulfillment for Anai's Nin but also a time of peril. Her health is increasingly shadowed by the threat of cancer, which forces her into retirement at the end of 1974. Her visit that summer to Bali, one of sensuous and spiritual delight, is the moment she chooses to end her journal. An epilogue includes excerpts from two notebooks that she kept during her remaining years, bringing the most acclaimed diary of our time to a moving, transcendent close.
