Anaïs Nin is remembered as a prolific 20th-century diarist and pioneer of modern erotica, but her most staggering creation was the psychological architecture she built to hide her reality. This episode explores the woman who carried a lie box of index cards to manage two simultaneous marriages.

From a fractured, fatherless childhood to psychoanalysis in 1920s Paris and bicoastal bigamy in America, Nin refused to choose between stability and freedom. We trace how she curated her own myth, publishing sanitized diaries in life and leaving the uncensored truth for after her death.

• How her diary, begun at age 11, became her psychological anchor
• Her studies with Otto Rank and blurred boundaries with her analysts
• Writing commissioned erotica at a dollar a page, later published as Delta of Venus
• The elaborate inde ...