that my diary-writing is a vice. I came home worn out by magnificent talks with Henry at the café; I glided into my bedroom, closed the curtains, threw a log into the fire, lit a cigarette, pulled the diary out of its last hiding place under my dressing table, threw it on the ivory silk quilt, and prepared for bed. I had the feeling that this is the way an opium smoker prepares for his opium pipe. For this is the moment when I relive my life in terms of a dream, a myth, an endless story.“
–Anais Nin, The Diary, Volume 1
What’s coming through in my reading is that even as she was writing the diary, she did not think of it in the traditional mode as a secret, an intimate diary. She hired a young woman to transcribe what she wrote with a typewriter, she showed it to the people she was hanging out with. She used parts of it in her fiction writing. The diary was the place for everything, her "realism” as she called it. But she wrote it conscious that others might read it, though it is very intimate at times.