Reunited: The Correspondence of Anais and Joaquin Nin, 1933-1940

The incestuous affair between the writer Anais Nin and her father, the pianist-composer Joaquin Nin, is well documented in the volume of her unexpurgated diary published under the title Incest. What has been missing from that account is Joaquin’s point of view. Reunited: The Correspondence of Anais and Joaquin Nin, 1933-1940 presents more than one hundred intimate communications between these two artistic geniuses, revealing not only the dynamics of their complex relationship but also why Anais spent her life in a never-ending battle to feel loved, appreciated, and understood.

Reunited collects the correspondence between Anais and Joaquin just before, during, and after the affair, which commenced in 1933, twenty years after he had abandoned his ten-year-old daughter and the rest of his family. These letters were long believed to have been destroyed and lost to history. In 2006, however, a folder containing Joaquin’s original letters to his daughter was discovered in Anais’s Los Angeles home, along with a second folder of her letters to him. Together, these letters tell the story of an absent father’s attempt to reconnect with his adult daughter and how that rapprochement quickly turned into an illicit sexual relationship.