A mirror of her own: Anais Nin's autobiographical performances

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Abstract
Noted diarist and cult celebrity Anais Nin spent her final years on the college lecture circuit, performing her Diary and encouraging students to construct their identities as they would a work of art. Although she is described as “one of the most fluent and engaging speakers of our time,” Nin's performance style and the ways in which performance culminated her self‐creating enterprise have received little critical attention. This essay, grounded in the assumption that Nin skillfully constructed her audience as co‐performers of her Diary persona, explores the aesthetic and rhetorical strategies she used to successfully negotiate that identity through performance. It describes an “aesthetic of incarnation” whereby Nin embodied the autobiographical construct “Anais, “ and it explicates the rhetoric through which she ensured audience participation in that illusion. Finally, it suggests that Nin's autobiographical performances spark provocative questions in the larger context of women's self‐identifying practices.

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