When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing

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 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.

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, and When You Listen to This Song received the France’s Grand prix des lectrices ELLE 2023, the Prix Décembre 2022, and the Prix Les Inrockuptibles 2022. She lives in Paris, France. Lauren Elkin is a Franco-American writer and translator, the author of Art Monsters: Unruly Bodies in Feminist Art and Scaffolding. She lives in London, UK.