WHEN YOU LISTEN TO THIS SONG

A writer reflects on Anne Frank’s diary, attentive to its ongoing significance for the world.

In her 2022 novel Reeling, French author Lafon explored the lives of young female dancers in the 1980s, exploited by middle-aged men purporting to help them, and the aftermath of their abuse. In her 2016 novel The Little Communist Who Never Smiled, she wrote a fictional account of gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s childhood in Romania, which ends with the gold medalist’s daring defection to the U.S. Here, Lafon explores the circumstances surrounding another young woman in peril: the writer Anne Frank. Blending historical fact, interviews, Frank’s writing, and personal rumination, the book chronicles a night that Lafon spends at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, with full access to its exhibits and the annex where the Franks lived in secret for two years evading the Nazis. Lafon is unflinching in her observations of the museum—“Everything here wants to be as authentic as possible, and yet none of it is, except for this oppressive feeling of absence”—and in her questions: “When did Otto Frank finally realize that the faith he had placed in their adoptive country was a tragic mistake?” One of the most striking revelations is how normal the Franks’ lives seemed shortly before they went into hiding—Anne posed with her sister at the beach for a photo—and how that sense of normalcy was something they strived to maintain—Anne pinned her favorite film stars to the walls in the annex—as their world unraveled. We learn that after the Nazis captured the Franks, it was Miep Gies, one of Otto’s employees, who not only cared for them while they hid, but who, at great personal risk, saved Anne Frank’s diary from being destroyed. The Franks’ story and the author’s quest to investigate her own experience intertwine to create a testament to the power of words.

A poignant historiography of Anne Frank’s writing and the author’s response to it.