Pisces 2025 (19 February - 20 March)
original art by Bex McKay
Anaïs Nin: A Slippery Fish
Angela Anaïs Juana Antolina Rosa Edelmira Nin y Culmell (better known as Anaïs Nin, because her whole name wouldn’t fit on a book spine) was born in France 21 February 1903 to Cuban parents who split up when she was two years old, whereupon her mother decamped with Anaïs and her two brothers to Barcelona. From Barcelona, the group moved to New York City where Nin dropped out of high school at the age of 16.
Pisces are known for their adaptability, and Nin demonstrated her flexible intellect by turning her hand to modeling, dancing, writing, acting, and psychoanalysis (which we suppose can be an amalgam of her three other careers). She also became the lover of more than a few practitioners of whatever career she happened to be pursuing at the moment, because her flexibility didn’t stop at her intellect.
Nin’s habit of introspection (a quality associated with the 8 of Cups) began at the age of 11, when she first began keeping a journal – a habit she maintained until her death a month shy of her 74th birthday. Her introspective streak led her to pursue an interest in psychoanalysis, allowing her in true Pisces fashion to pursue access to parts of her psyche that would enable her to accurately express the depth of her emotions. Her extensive studies of psychoanalysis led her to try her hand at it, but her inability to maintain an emotional distance from her patients (so Pisces) meant she had to give it up.
Another 8 of Cups association, escapism, showed in both her personal life and in her work. In her personal life, she married twice, not bothering to formally divorce the first husband before tying the knot with the second, and then spent years living a sort of double life, keeping two identities. She once said “I tell so many lies, I have to write them down and keep them in a lie box so I can keep them straight.” Only after running into trouble with the IRS when both husbands tried to claim her on their tax returns did she agree to have her second marriage annulled, although she continued to live with her second not-husband until her death.
Nin’s most famous work, the collection of erotic stories Delta of Venus, is nothing but escapism. She began writing erotica in the 1940s when she and some friends began writing it for an anonymous collector who paid well. She resisted publishing it widely until the end of her life, when sexual mores had relaxed enough to make it palatable to a wider audience.
A true Pisces, after her death she returned to the sea, having her ashes scattered in Santa Monica Bay.
