[...] Later that same year I went to New York and various people at a party asked me what had I been reading lately and when I said Anaïs Nin many of them were noticeably thrown off guard – Nin was not à la mode and hadn’t been for aeons – they had nothing up their sleeve at all to say in response and replied, in a dismissive yet wistful sort of way, that they’d read her years ago, when they were at college – as if that was the only time in life that Anaïs Nin should be read. I said it really was worth reading her again. I said that I’d been particularly struck by the way she writes about sexual relations as a way of uprooting herself, of remaining unfixed, of transgressing the familiar lines of her personality. In fact, if anything – though I did not say this – Nin should be read later on in life, when one has solidified and feels so very sure of themselves and would perhaps benefit from coming undone, from perhaps going out of their minds. Nin did not shy away from the phantoms and fantasies that haunt and goad us – on the contrary, she cajoled and probed them. Sex, as far as she was concerned, was as much an existential adventure as it was an erotic one. [...]