Overview

A quietly powerful exploration of memory and forgetting, from one of France's leading feminist public intellectuals In 2021, the award-winning French writer Lola Lafon was granted permission to stay overnight—alone for ten hours—in the Annex in Amsterdam where Anne Frank and her family had hidden from the Nazis between 1942 and 1944. Lafon's visit to this space, where Anne Frank wrote her famous diary, evoked the confinement and constant danger suffered by the Franks, and the family's ghostly presence as well. ""The night was inhabited, lit by reflections,"" Lafon writes. ""Some urgency dwelled at the heart of the Annex, crouched there, ready to be discovered."" Lafon introduces a new vision of Anne Frank, not as a venerated and exploited myth but as the precocious, ambitious, and beloved girl she was, as well as a disciplined writer whose well-loved diary is in fact a carefully constructed literary work. Throughout, Lafon reflects on what it means to lose loved ones, both Lafon's own family in the Holocaust and her childhood friend to the Khmer Rouge. A prize-winner and best-seller in France, this book asks us to consider the stories we tell ourselves about tragedy, how we grapple with loss, and why, in the face of danger and confinement, women write. Winner of France's Grand prix des lectrices ELLE 2023, the Prix Décembre 2022, and the Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2022

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9780300275889

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Reviews

“Lola Lafon’s book is an unusually haunting meditation on history, memory, and what the living owe to the dead, via a uniquely personal immersion in the story of Anne Frank.”—Ruth Franklin, author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank “This book brings Anne Frank to life not as a victim, but as a writer. In meditating on Frank’s genius, Lafon lets us into writing’s intent: ‘We write . . . to lay hold of reality.’”—Darcey Steinke, author of This Is the Door: The Body, Pain, and Faith “Lola Lafon’s memoiristic meditation sneaks up on us with a quiet but distinct emotional and intellectual intensity. Rather than narrate in booming voiceover the familiar story of the very famous and doomed Anne Frank, Lafon slips in through a much more interesting writerly side entrance, as she prepares herself for an unlikely sort of sleepover with the dead.”—Adina Hoffman, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City Accolades for the French edition: Grand prix des lectrices de Elle, Prix Décembre, and Prix Les Inrockuptibles

""Lola Lafon's memoiristic meditation sneaks up on us with a quiet but distinct emotional and intellectual intensity. Rather than narrate in booming voiceover the familiar story of the very famous and doomed Anne Frank, Lafon slips in through a much more interesting writerly side entrance, as she prepares herself for an unlikely sort of sleepover with the dead.""—Adina Hoffman, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City ""Lola Lafon’s book is an unusually haunting meditation on history, memory, and what the living owe to the dead, via a uniquely personal immersion in the story of Anne Frank.""—Ruth Franklin, author of The Many Lives of Anne Frank

""Lola Lafon's memoiristic meditation sneaks up on us with a quiet but distinct emotional and intellectual intensity. Rather than narrate in booming voiceover the familiar story of the very famous and doomed Anne Frank, Lafon slips in through a much more interesting writerly side entrance, as she prepares herself for an unlikely sort of sleepover with the dead.""—Adina Hoffman, author of Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City

Author Information

Lola Lafon is a French writer who grew up in Eastern Europe and studied dance and music in Paris and New York. Her prizewinning books include The Little Communist Who Never Smiled and Reeling: A Novel. She lives in Paris, France. Lauren Elkin is a French and American writer and translator. She is the author of several books, including Flâneuse and Scaffolding, and lives in London, UK.

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