When You Listen to This Song

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, When You Listen to This Song 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.

When You Listen to This Song was the winner of France's Grand prix des lectrices ELLE 2023, the Prix Décembre 2022, and the Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2022.