Anaïs Nin

Kept a diary from the age of eleven, originally as letters to the father who had abandoned the family, and continued it for more than sixty years.

The published diaries made her famous in the 1960s and are the work she is read for, though what appeared during her lifetime was heavily edited, with the husbands removed. Henry and June and Incest were released unexpurgated after her death.

She was married to two men simultaneously for years, on opposite American coasts, running two households with two chequebooks and a card index to keep the lies consistent. The explicit stories, written in the forties for a dollar a page, were published late and outsold everything else.