Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies
Léonie Bischoff (Translated by Jenna Allen)
Fantagraphics, 2023
Review by Victoria McIntyre
In Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies, twisted multicoloured strands of pencil crayon depict the life and budding yearnings of the famous writer. Nin is mostly known for her gripping personal diaries and groundbreaking work writing erotica from the female gaze. Inspired by her diaries, Cartoonist Léonie Bischoff created a biographical graphic novel that explores Nin’s internal world and her writer’s philosophy. Bischoff captures Nin’s mystic sensuality with visual and written language that gracefully draws the reader into the world of the story, rather than boldly jumping out at them from the page. She explores Nin’s sexuality through the dreamy lens that shaped the writer’s own depictions throughout her career.
The book delves into Anaïs Nin’s life in 1930s Paris, where she struggles to play the part of the perfect wife to a husband who has changed from a man with dreams of being an artist, to a comfortable banker happy to take the easier path. Anaïs’s multifaceted identity is first introduced through her diary: she keeps one for her husband, Hugo, to read and a secret one for herself, where she begins to unspool the tightly wound thread of her sexual yearnings. Bischoff personifies Anaïs’s secret diary, depicting it as a woman, another Anaïs who wears a slinky dress and has a tangled mane of rainbow hair that floats around her head. The woman’s tangled hair speaks to the twisted complexity of Anaïs’s internal world. The diary gives voice to Anaïs’s more controversial thoughts—the ones that contradict the role she’s supposed to play, the woman the world wants her to be. This was a time when women couldn’t vote or open a bank account, where all kinds of independence were limited, and so was the discourse around it. Anaïs was expected to be a submissive wife who doesn’t talk about her desires, let alone write about them. The diary points out that Anaïs is suffocating. When Anaïs tries to defend her husband from the diary’s attacks, it asks her the question that will answer many reader’s doubts as the story progresses: “But who will support you?” Throughout the narrative, if Anaïs wants to have any level of bodily independence, she will have to find a way to support her desires herself, even if she has to build her multiplicitous life on a sea of lies.
The reader is drawn into a disjointed flow of affair after affair, into sexual experiences that haunt Anaïs and ones that set her free. Some with therapists, one with her father, and others with writers, such as Henry Miller, and his wife, the effervescent June. Bischoff uses fine line drawings and occasional bold splash pages to express the effects of this endless stream of lovers. And while Anaïs is telling enough lies to support the metaphoric title of this work, the real ocean in this book is generated by her deep and explorative sensuality. Bischoff portrays this facet of Anaïs using aquatic and floral imagery that submerges the reader in the unknowable space of the diarist’s mind. At this time in her life, her sensuality shapes her internal landscape but is only just finding its way into her external world. The book chronicles Anaïs’s journey of self-discovery, of dipping her toes into the ocean that lives inside of her, waiting to burst free in crashing waves. Henry Miller refers to Hugo and Anaïs’s house, where they often write together in the garden as the “laboratory of the soul.” But it is in her deep sea of sensuality, this “ember burning inside” of her that she’s “afraid to let…shine,” that she finds the true “laboratory of the soul.”
Throughout the book, Bischoff explores the motif of mirrors—shattered and whole—as symbolic of the multiple lives Anaïs lives, the woman she becomes with each lover, and the writer she is on her own. Sometimes, these reflections give life to her creativity and her desires. In others, they show how broken she feels, how fragmented. Ultimately, the story asks, is there any way to be whole other than to acknowledge all of the facets of one’s being? We can’t erase our contradictions, but we can embrace them.
The more Anaïs explores the world, her writing, and her lovers’ bodies, the more “innocent” she feels. In this narrative, the famous adulteress’s lies are reframed in an important way. Perhaps in answer to the question posed earlier in the story by her personified diary, Anaïs defends her deceits by claiming them all as necessary to living her truth. In a time when women didn’t have the right to make independent choices, where birth control was illegal and so was openly dating other women, lies were a form of liberation. She states: “If I don’t create a world by myself and for myself, I would die, suffocated by the world others have defined for me.” Sentences like this populate the novel with stubborn strength and simple prose, accompanied by the gauzy beauty of Bischoff’s illustrations.
While Bischoff carefully depicts the complexity of Anaïs’s circumstances, she occasionally drifts away from focusing on the novelist’s artistic philosophy. It is most finely wrought in the following panels. Here, Anaïs and Henry argue over how to best capture their shared muse, his wife, June.
Bischoff uses stunning imagery to encapsulate Henry’s clinical, masculine approach to mercilessly peeling back June’s layers. She also aptly conveys the value Anaïs places on writing from a dreamy, mystical perspective, a viewpoint that she sees as uniquely feminine. Interestingly, in some ways, this depiction of June could be seen as a version of what some might call the manic pixie dream girl trope. Yes, Anaïs wants to shroud her muse in mystery, but she also seems to see her as sacred. A being too complex and lovely to be fully captured. Also, more importantly, she relates to her. She sees June as living off her “reflection in the eyes of others,” mirroring Anaïs’s own experiences. Perhaps the complexity of her portrayal of June comes from her general commentary on the role of women in society. She treats her subject as a goddess, a being to be admired and looked up to—not brought down to earth where she can be picked apart and treated like property.
The book explores taboo subjects—illegal abortions, incest, affairs—but does not treat them as taboo. At least, not fully. Perhaps this choice speaks to Anaïs Nin’s decision to “invent a language to tell” her story, to find personal power and autonomy in the pain and the love. By the time she tells the reader: “I believe in my magic,” I have no doubt that they will too.
Victoria McIntyre is a writer currently working on the unceded lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilw̓əta (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. She is the Reviews Editor at PRISM international. She is also an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia. Her work has been published by The Scholastic Art & Writing Awards, The Goose, The Hart House Review, and others.