My first memoir, The Husband Swap, and the companion guide, Lessons in Life and Love to My Younger Self, were originally published as two separate books in 2015. Together, they provide an example of how I’ve transformed my reality. One was a dark and painful recounting of events, written in real time. The other I wrote later, and was my attempt to document what I’d needed to learn in order to move on to a healthier life. It is only fitting that they should be joined now in this new volume, titled A World in Us, after one of Anaïs Nin’s most famous quotes.
It was my editor, Eve Rickert, who first suggested the quote, which was beloved by many polyamorous people (and which she’d cited in her own book, More Than Two). But afterwards, I wondered whether she wasn’t trying to tell me something.
“I like Richard Bach more,” I’d replied, skeptical.
But Jonathan Livingstone Seagull wasn’t a polyamorous bird.
Before Nin was scattered across the internet via memes featuring rosebuds bedecked with glistening dew, I’d never heard of her. My British schooling consisted of mainly male authors, like Charles Dickens and William Golding, who taught me that I deserved nothing and only had value if I could limp onwards after the hardest of knocks, lest I end up like Pip or Piggy. So I plunged myself into Nin’s bohemian world, which she painstakingly chronicled over 60 years, and fell into an abyss. It's warm and still down here. It's a place where emotional truth is bonded to the oxygen you breathe. It's an inky dark womb. A place where I could be reborn.
Nin was a memoirist, like me. Who was all kinds of fucked up, like me. Who followed love and personal growth as if it were an extremist religion, like me. Who was riddled with self-doubt, who was dedicated to the confusion of her psyche and who wrote about her deliberations compulsively. Like me.
Nin existed more fully in the pages of her own diaries, where the spoken and the unspoken meet. Some say she lived to create events for the sole purpose of writing about them in her journal, perhaps even more than desiring the experience itself. But I believe she edited her stories to create an aspirational and more beautiful life until they resembled an identity she could live with and by—like me. I've looked into the mirror so often, looking for identity and not finding it; I’ve written it down and searched for the truth, and then I’ve written my life and lived according to new — and I hope better — truths.
And so my editor and I decided that not just the compilation, but all my future memoirs, would have titles inspired by Nin’s work.
To many, Nin was an inspiration; to others, she was a monster. To me, she was a person who needed to write in order to live better. Like her, I have proved to myself that I can change my story and be cured of my past by writing and reframing it. I am so grateful for this, because the alternative was to remain, like Pip and Piggy, lost forever.
Louisa
July 2016