2024-09-15

Adorning Your Creative Space

Words by JOUISSANCE

A Literary Guide

Les Cahiers Secrets was created with passages from Anaïs Nin’s diaries in mind. Using notes that recall audacious vintage fragrances, we imagined a woman bejewelling her creative space with all her favourite luxuries in order to retreat to a sensual state of feverish creativity.

Alongside her literary talent and erotic imagination, what we love about Nin is her insistence on aesthetic indulgences. Anaïs Nin is not the only writer to adorn herself and her home in order to better facilitate the creative process, but few writers have devoted so many words as she did to delighting every sense.

Clarice Lispector said "to write you I first cover myself with perfume". Anaïs Nin's necessities included "good coffee, on lacquered trays... silk stockings and perfume". bell hooks' moments of clarity came "amid the luxurious smells of expensive French lemon verbena soap".

Adorning one's surroundings with sensory and material delights can only stimulate the imagination: this month in our commonplace book, tips from our favourite artists, and works of fiction and cinema on how to adorn your creative space.

Writing and perfume, Clarice Lispector...

and Anaïs Nin, Henry and June

By bell hooks. One of our essential texts on women, writing and the need for time, space and adornment.

A similar sentiment in Anaïs Nin's diary.

From Henry & June (1990)

From the source, Anaïs Nin's diary.

Our favourite place to write, Anaïs Nin portrayed by Maria de Medeiros in Henry and June (1990)...

...and Colette played by Kiera Knightly in Colette 2018.

Women's writing rooms imagined by Virginia Woolf.

Virginia Woolf’s desk in her writing shed at Monks House, East Sussex

The sitting room at Charleston House, home of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

The mantlepiece at Charleston House, home of the artists Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant.

Anaïs Nin's home described in Henry and June: From the Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1989

Anaïs Nin's writing room in her California home.

The writing desk in Lee Miller's sitting room at Farleys House.

Vita Sackville-West's desk in her writing room in the Elizabethan Tower at Sissinghurst Castle.

†Words by JOUISSANCE

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Jouissance Diary

"It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture living moments," Anaïs Nin wrote. "In the Diary I only wrote of what interested me genuinely, what I felt most strongly at the moment, and I found this fervour, this enthusiasm produced a vividness which often withered in the formal work. Improvisation, free association, obedience to mood, impulse, brought forth countless images, portraits, descriptions, impressionistic sketches, symphonic experiments, from which I could dip at any time for material."

In tribute to Anaïs Nin, one of our foremost inspirations for Jouissance, our DIARY captures our most treasured moments, our obsessions and preoccupations, our research and the lessons we learn, and the work of our cherished friends and collaborators.