The major theme in this final volume is Anaïs Nin’s late-life success with the Diary, a success unparalleled by any other of its time and one that astonished both its author and its publisher, Harcourt Brace. The ever-shifting pulse of her work galvanized a generation in transition as few if any before it, appealing to both sexes from a feminist perspective.  This would be a recurrent them of the last Diary, as Nin emphasized both in her rejection of a militant feminism that refused the male, and in her concurrent book of essays, In Favor of the Sensitive Man. 

Running along with this theme—that of the Diary itself—is the physical challenge of Nin’s last decade, that of the cancer that gradually ravaged and finally took her.  Nin faced this challenge candidly and heroically, maintaining a schedule of lectures, travel, and work on the remaining volumes of the Diary that would have exhausted a woman half her age.  There is little direct mention of this in the final volume until the end neared, but the years that brought Nin a wide audience were a race against time.  It was this, too, that gives the volume its very appropriate title, A Joyous Transformation.  The phrase is Nin’s own, from the highly ceremonial burial she witnessed during these years on a South Sea island, in which a cremation involving the whole community is turned into a release of the spirit from the body symbolically shared by all.  It was what she hoped the Diary would achieve in her own lifetime, and for the future in its progressive revelation. 

That revelation would also be a dialogue, as Nin recognized in incorporating much of the correspondence she sent and received.  It made the Diary a collaborative effort, and not simply a single voice alone.  In that sense, The Diary of Anaïs Nin is an ongoing project, a bequest that will have and give life as long as others respond to it.  That should be a very long time.

-Robert Zaller, Editor of A Casebook on Anais Nin