When a book editor invited the renowned French novelist Lola Lafon to contribute a volume to Edition Stock’s popular “Night at the Museum” series — in which authors camp out in a museum overnight and write about the experience — Lafon was hesitant.
“I couldn’t see myself being in an art museum and able to legitimately write about it,” she said over herbal tea recently in a favorite Parisian cafe, cozy with fireplaces and soft armchairs.
Then she had an idea.
“She said, ‘There’s only one place where I would want to spend the night,’” said Alina Gurdiel, the editor who asked Lafon to join a list of series contributors that already included Leïla Slimani and Enki Bilal, among others. “‘And that’s in the Anne Frank House.’”
The resulting book, a slim essay released in French in 2021 and published in the United States last month as “When You Listen to This Song,” saw Lafon spend an August night, alone, in the Amsterdam attic annex where Anne Frank and seven other people hid from the Nazis for 25 months. A reckoning not just with the idea of Anne Frank and her “Diary of a Young Girl” but with Lafon’s own past, it has been a sensation in its native France.
“What can be done with one single night?” Lafon asks in the book. “It would take years to reply.”
Lauren Elkin, the book’s English translator, was initially skeptical: “When I first heard about it I thought, just what we need, another book about Anne Frank — but actually we do need this book. It’s the most beautiful meditation on memory and absence and winds up in the most unexpected places.”
The complexities of girlhood are a subject that Lafon, an outspoken feminist, has addressed throughout her career, in novels such as “The Little Communist Who Never Smiled” (2014), about the Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci, and “Reeling” (2022), set in the world of ballet and jazz dance (Lafon, 51, is a former classical dancer). So in a sense, Anne Frank was a natural subject — the object of obsession, fetishization and, at times, a flattening idealization.
“I really love the idea of writing about something that is very well known, the opposite of writing about discovery,” Lafon said. “I feel the novel where you discover something is very male. I don’t discover lands. I know the lands I’m writing about.”
Lafon, who had not read “The Diary of a Young Girl” since her own school days, had no illusions that one night would render her an authority. But asking questions felt increasingly important. Anne Frank (as Lafon calls her throughout, shunning the first-name chumminess so many adopt) has become “a symbol, but of what? Why do we love her so much? What do we love, and how do we love her?”
There was a more personal angle, too. “A French writer referred to it as my Jewish coming-out,” Lafon said. It started with a conversation with her sister. “You write about a lot of things, you talk about sexual violence, you talk about people personally, but you never seem Jewish,” Lafon paraphrased. “And I felt offended because it was true; I hadn’t confronted it at all.”
Lafon grew up in a family in which her mother, hidden throughout World War II, never acknowledged being Jewish. Because of her French name and blond coloring, Lafon herself was able to “pass” — and gladly did. But it was more than this; as a student, she avoided any lessons that dealt with the Holocaust, sneered at “Schindler’s List” and “Life Is Beautiful,” veered away from the darkness of her family’s past. As she writes: “I didn’t want to hear about it, didn’t want to know about it. Their nightmares would not be my own. All I wanted was to be part of a normal family, who didn’t have history books written about them, who inspired neither pity nor hatred.”
She said: “As a writer, when you realize there’s something you don’t talk about, that you don’t have the words for, you write. I believe in writing that costs you something.”
She found a way into the project through the text of the diary itself. But she rejected the conventional view that the book represents the naïve and relatable record of a young Everygirl. “Anne Frank was, in fact, a writer,” said Lafon — and one who wrote explicitly for publication: Having heard the exiled Dutch minister of education on the annex’s radio, asking his countrymen to keep their journals as testimony, she set about revising her work for public consumption.
Lafon was struck by the difference between the diary’s original words and the bowdlerized version most of us have read, which eliminates hints of anger, bitterness and same-sex desire to present a sanitized postwar document promoted by a grieving father and a Hollywood machine eager to render the story “universal.”
“It’s like very young saints, where we need something from their youth and purity,” she said. “In Anne Frank’s case, people love her banality, they love her ordinariness.”
But in fact the diarist, 16 at the time of her death, was a disciplined worker and intuitive stylist, who deliberately added structural devices like the interlocutor “Kitty,” contributed a momentum to the story and fleshed out characters for the reader. “She had an ear for dialogue and for scene far beyond her years,” says Lafon. “The way she alternates between the general and particular, it’s a masterpiece.”
Jessie Kindig, the Yale University Press editor who published the book in English, admired Lafon’s analysis: “Lola’s not afraid of the fierce ambition and kind of ruthlessness — and I mean that in a really good sense — the writerly ruthlessness of Anne Frank.”
Lafon also realized she had never really confronted Anne Frank’s death — of typhus, in Bergen-Belsen, shortly before the camp’s liberation. “You want her to live and not have read the diary. We want her innocence preserved. We like an ending that does that.”
But the 10 hours Lafon spent alone in the annex proved a revelation. “You feel like you’re in a place that is a shelter and a trap,” said Lafon. “And a tomb. But it’s empty.”
Lafon found herself thinking of Otto Frank, the lone survivor of the family, who made the decision to publish his daughter’s diaries. In the Netherlands, Lafon says, she learned that many people questioned his actions. “They thought he could have hidden them better, done something different, left Holland — but how?”
At some point during the night she started thinking about her grandparents, refugees from Poland who moved to France very young. “For them, France was Camus, and it was culture,” she said. Committed Communists, they were drawn to the country’s history of philosophy and humanism. “My grandfather worshiped France. And two years after arriving, he was ordered to wear a yellow star.”
People, she said, “idealize things with a tragic hope. And I see the parallel with Otto, hoping that the Netherlands would remain neutral — and staying.”
Lafon had always found her grandparents’ neuroses, their grim intensity, alienating. “But now I understand, they were crazy with anxiety. All their family was killed at Auschwitz.”
Perpetual outsiders in the country they idealized, her grandparents had no photos and few personal possessions — they had lost it all during the war. “Now I understand that I have seen refugees with no one left,” she said.
Lafon’s book ends with a confrontation even more deeply buried, but one that casts light on questions of loss, of youth, of identity.
Although she’s known success before, the book’s reception — it’s sold more than 150,000 copies and won multiple prizes — has surprised Lafon. “What I feared the most when it was published was that the book would only speak to people of my background,” she said. “And what’s overwhelming me is that I see people who say, ‘This is my grandmother’ — and they came from Algeria.”
Still, she thinks she understands why the book resonates: “It was about absence, and it was about loss. How do you grow up and live with a void? With people that you will never be able to mourn because you don’t know where they are? It’s like a never-ending sentence. The sentence has no full stop.”
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