[Anaïs] would set up these elaborate façades in Los Angeles and in New York, but it became so complicated that she had to create something she called the lie box. She had this absolutely enormous purse and in the purse she had two sets of checkbooks. One said Anaïs Guiler for New York and another said Anaïs Pole for Los Angeles. She had prescription bottles from California doctors and New York doctors with the two different names. And she had a collection of file cards. And she said, “I tell so many lies I have to write them down and keep them in the lie box so I can keep them straight.”

Dierdre Bair

Boomers around my age will recognize Anais Nin. Just as they know Kurt Vonnegut, J.D. Salinger, Richard Brautigan, Hermann Hesse, e.e. cummings, Carlos Castaneda, et. al..

Often a Writer will help to define a generation beyond their own. This belated popularity may have nothing to do with talent. I suspect the case with Anais has more to do with her loose morals and her feminist appeal than the value of her work. In any case, Anais Nin hit it big in the Sixties.

They didn’t call it The Swinging Sixties for nothing.

I’ll allow that she did a lot of writing. Particularly with her diary that rambles on for about a million pages. I confess I admire Anais Nin. Mainly because she upstaged Henry Miller. When it came to living the image she chose to project in her fiction, Anais made Henry look like a poser.

Anais was an avowed Bigamist, with a long suffering husband in New York, and a younger, more viral, husband in Los Angeles. In 1966 Anais had her marriage to the L.A. Toy Boy annulled only because both husbands filed tax returns claiming Nin as a spouse. The taxes always get you in the end. She was never charged with Bigamy. She continued to live with the L.A. dude until her death in 1977….

Writer’s Luck

Writing a novel is a crapshoot.

“Don’t try it,” Bukowski says on his gravestone.

You can have all the elements in place…rewrite the fucker a dozen times… hire a big time editor…follow all the advice offered by all the “experts”. You can do everything possible to get it right. Toss years of your life down the drain. You’re nothing but a sap. Nobody believes you’re worth a shit with this writing business. You do the work anyway. Because you believe in yourself.

Then, after all that effort, what do you got? A rock. A dead thing. Not even a interesting rock. You could maybe use it for a door stop…

You’re a loser. You should just crawl under that rock.

I figured that would happen to me. But it didn’t. I got lucky. My book has some life to it. I could get luckier still and sell lots of copies. But the first order of business is to write something that’s enjoyable to read. Ask any writer. They’ll tell you. It matters. Otherwise, what’s the point of writing fiction? You might as well be writing Life Insurance Policies.

So how did I get my novel even half-ass right? Luck. Sucker’s luck. But having a good box of lies helped.

A solid box of lies. That’s how Log Of The Yardbird was born.

All Writers have a Lie Box

You need a Lie Box. Otherwise, you’ll lose all your friends.

This happened to Ernest Hemingway. He didn’t lose all his friends. Just the ones that did him favors. He wrote about Harold Loeb in The Sun Also Rises and the depiction was a little too close for comfort. Harold threatened to kill him. Nothing came of it, but Harold wasn’t the last guy Hemingway pissed off with his fiction. He bashed F. Scott Fitzgerald in his short story The Snows Of Kilimanjaro. Poor Scott was on the downslide and Hemingway belittled him. Worse, he used his real name in the original printing of the short story. And this was a guy who helped launch Hemingway’s career!

Somebody said of Hemingway, “He never let a favor go unpunished.”

Philip Roth in his novel Portnoy’s Complaint was a bit stingy with his lie box. His parents were not so happy with the result. There’s a scene where Portnoy fucks a lump of raw liver which his mother later cooks for dinner.

Makes you wonder what his real mother thought after reading that. Maybe no big deal, eh?

This man was a great american writer. He won every award offered. Why does he look so miserable?

Ask Claire Bloom.

The Meaning Of Life

I don’t know why I have this urge to write. Maybe I do it as a way of making sense of this world we’re all stuck in. This awful evil desperate maw of life and death. This crazy-ass world. I hate to be negative. But is making sense of the world even possible?

“The best of all things is something entirely outside your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you is to die soon.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy

Old Nietzsche ended up in a madhouse. This is where Negativity can land you.

Maybe I write because I find it enjoyable. It’s just something I do that makes me feel good inside. I’m offering a bit of entertainment to my fellow human beings….

This is the positive view. Maybe I’ll cling to that. Life has some meaning for me as long as I keep writing. Even if I’m only pretending.

That’s right.

Just me and my Box Of Lies.