Another remarkable treasure from the UCLA Special Collections at the Fowler: the second diary of Anais Nin when she was 12 years old, having just the previous year begun keeping her infamous diaries in Kew Gardens, New York. She had begun the first volume on the boat over from Neuilly, France where she was born to talented Cuban musician emigres.

Her mother Rosa bought the first notebook in the 'hope that it would distract Anais from her fear of abandonment." Anais later said she had begun the diary as a letter to her absent father. But the notebooks proved much more than that. Things were not real to her until she committed them to paper. Her brother said, 'the diary was her indispensible lifeline."

The diaries explored her fascination with herself. We think of her today as one of the first really honest memoirists.

She was still writing in French, until she was 18 when this photograph of her posing as Cleopatra was taken. By then the diary had become a reflection on marriage, career, what the future might hold. "Love me someone," she had told her diary.

Nin went on to become loved and the lover of many men, including Henry Miller, two husbands whom she stashed on different coasts, (She had what she called a 'lie box' to keep her two lives straight) a writer of erotica for money. Though the later diaries and erotica are much more well known, as they were titillating when published, when I saw this one in her perfect, girlish script with the drawing on the facing page showing her window, I was very moved.

All of Nin's original diaries are at UCLA, in Los Angeles, where she died in 1977. They are the only truly unexpurgated versions.