A quietly powerful exploration of memory and forgetting from one of France's leading feminist
public intellectuals "A labyrinth of looping interlocked narratives which spiral out beyond
the Annex as the night progresses. . . . The penultimate pages of this elegiac book are a
sword-thrust to the heart."-Laurel Berger Irish Times 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 still dwelled at the
heart of the Annex crouched there ready to be discovered." Exploring the many stories told
about Anne Frank Lafon tries to find the precocious girl at the heart of the venerated and
exploited myth a disciplined writer whose famous diary is in fact a wonderfully 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 prizewinner and
bestseller 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.
