Last night I had a dream in which I am sitting at a table in a coffee house and about to write in my journal when the coffee house closes. But, before it does a woman, neither young nor old, nondescript but cheerful, walks up to me and says, "I've always liked Anais Nin."
All day I think about that, about Anais Nin, about her writing, her journals, about my mother, who adored her, about why I still have my mother's Anais Nin books - her journals, some erotica - front and center on my bookshelf where I see them every day decades after Anais Nin wrote them and a decade after my mother passed away.
Today it comes to me that there has always been a part of me that hates Anais Nin just a little bit for giving my mother ideas and for my mother leaving me as a young girl to try and live the writer's life.
Why dream about her now?
What has Anais Nin to tell me or what have I to learn from her after all these years?
[Excerpt from A Spy in the House of Love Project]