Photo reproduced by kind permission of the Anais Nin Trust. Compiled by such an author, happy to share their experience of publishing erotica on Amazon, it offered advice to avant-garde writers keen to turn their hand to this lucrative genre. According to the pack, popular topics included:. The list was both reassuring and nerve-wracking.
Which genre should I pick? I weighed up my own predilections versus the need to sell as many, as quickly, as I could. People tend to think authors are either loaded with J K Rowling as the norm or very poor.
My income had been a rollercoaster over the years; now, in summer , having enjoyed a luxurious view, I was zooming downwards, winds of warning hissing through me, stomach lurching with fear of the future. I lectured myself: I should have saved during the good times. Excited by the rare pleasure of money, I habitually blew it. Now for the budgeting. There were things I could give up easily: fancy notebooks, a trip to the cinema. I needed something that would be languid on the mind, leaving me plenty of ideas-fizz.
This was a question I also grappled with: could my creative prostitution involve high art, be the literary equivalent of Belle de Jour , stylish and sexy, or would I have to roil in whorish filth, using cheap metaphors and knocked-off cliches? It was a question of energy, of whether I had a surfeit left over after my proper writing; of the market and my readership; of whether to be proud or practical. N in met the American writer Henry Miller in Paris in He was middle-aged, homeless and, largely due to his devotion to his writing, broke.
Miller lived a bohemian life, begging meals from friends, sometimes resorting to sleeping on a park bench. Nin was in her late 20s, living out a rather dull, bourgeoise existence with her husband, the US-born financier and filmmaker Hugh Guiler, in the suburb of Louveciennes. She and Miller began a love affair. During these years, she supported him by siphoning off money from the allowance Guiler gave her, and gifting Miller notebooks and music, ink and paper.
