It gave me the courage to stay in a foreign country while I tried to find my identity outside of my family and cultural background.ĪN: The diaries served multiple purposes. … Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications.ĪMA: Your diary hit me like a bullet. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. Noticing Maciel Antunes’ interest in the cluster of cottages on the property, the landlord offered to show his own place, as he was moving out.Īnaïs Nin: You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. They saw a sign for rent with a handwritten number the landlord picked up and showed them a small apartment. But Maciel Antunes’ relationship with Nin crystallized on New Year’s Day 2019, when she went looking for a new home with her husband in Sierra Madre Canyon. In Los Angeles, the first gallery to offer Maciel Antunes a solo show was named Luna Anaïs, partly after the writer. IV.” When Maciel Antunes was working at an antique shop in Boston, a patron donated his entire collection of Nin’s books. The first book she chose was Nin’s “Diary Vol. Speaking little English, she sought affordable, used books to learn the language. Maciel Antunes traces this cosmic relationship to when she first immigrated from Brazil to the United States at age 20. Over the past decade, Maciel Antunes has been having conversations with Nin - the “invisible woman.” This abode is where her spirit lives, as Brazilian artist Amanda Maciel Antunes has come to know. house, of course, the one she lived in before Silver Lake in the 1950s, located at the foot of Sierra Madre Canyon. Nin’s life reflected her converging identities: immigrant, mystic, writer deeply invested in the female psyche. where she lived, part-time, during her last 20-some years - through her Silver Lake house designed by Eric Lloyd Wright, grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright.īut even that obscures the other chapters that more fully bring her existence into view. Her legacy has been reduced to her erotica and sexually explicit writing, her biography flattened to her famous lovers (Henry Miller) and bigamy, as she kept one husband in New York (filmmaker Hugh Parker Guiler) and another in Los Angeles (forest ranger Rupert Pole). Read the whole issue here.)įor everything that has been documented about Anaïs Nin, the French American writer, it is odd that she is so misunderstood. This story is part of Image issue 12, “Commitment (The Woo Woo Issue),” where we explore why Los Angeles is the land of true believers.