The Many Lives of Anne Frank

A Q&A with Ruth Franklin, the author of an amazing new literary biography

I can stop telling people about Ruth Franklin’s literary biography The Many Lives of Anne Frank. I raved about it in my recent review at the Chicago Tribune, and thanks to being in the midst of a flurry of talks about AI in education surrounding the release of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI, I’ve been able to draw on it as an example of the kind of historical inquiry we should be modeling for students where we read the original words of real historical figures, rather than practicing the digital necromancy of historical chatbots.

Just Say No to Historical Figure Chatbots

The Many Lives of Anne Frank does what the best books do, cause the reader to see the world around them through a fresh, enriched perspective. Given that I can’t stop talking about the book, I thought I’d try to talk to the author of the book. 

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Ruth Franklin is the author of the critically acclaimed biographies The Many Lives of Anne Frank, hailed as a “tour de force [that] sets the standard for anyone thinking about Anne Frank for years to come,” and Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography. Her first book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction (2011), was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Writing. Her work appears in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, the New York Review of Books,  Harper’s, and more. She lives in Brooklyn.

John Warner: I’m curious about the first time you read The Diary of a Young Girl. How old were you? Do you remember your response?

Ruth Franklin: I actually have my childhood copy of the diary, which was inscribed to me by my mother in fall 1982, when I was eight. To be honest, I wasn’t a girl who worshiped Anne Frank. Her idealism and maturity seemed impossible to live up to. But it was a foundational book for me regardless.

JW: When did you first start thinking about a book about Anne Frank? You have a previous book, A Thousand Darknesses: Lies and Truth in Holocaust Fiction that obviously explores related territory, but what’s the origin story of this book?

RF: Starting in the 1990s, I remember first hearing about the fact that Anne’s diary had been edited—not just by her father but also by her. This struck me as so important to understanding what the diary was, but it took me a while to be able to articulate why. Meanwhile, I was struck by the way Anne remains a cultural touchstone: her face appears on billboards, her quotes make the rounds of Instagram, and girls who write books in wartime are often called “the next Anne Frank.” I wanted to write a book that would put those pieces together, telling Anne’s story as a human being and an artist but also investigating what makes her so iconic.

JW: As a reader I was so struck by that idea of Anne purposefully, consciously editing her diary after she’d been in the annex so long. It seems sort of rare that we have such a clear point of origin for an artist. Help us understand the full context of that moment in Anne’s life and what’s so important about it?

RF: I too am fascinated by this story. On March 29, 1944, Anne writes in her diary about hearing a minister from the Dutch government in exile call for citizens to preserve their private documents from the war years for inclusion in a future national archive. He explicitly says that history can’t be written on the basis of official documents alone; documentation from private citizens is necessary. Anne immediately thought of her own diary, imagining a future audience who would be interested to learn “how we Jews lived and what we ate and talked about here.”

But it seems that on further reflection Anne realized that her diary, as originally written, wasn’t appropriate for a published audience. It was too personal for the eyes of strangers, but it also didn’t have enough information about the persecution of the Jews to really serve as a testimonial document. In May, a couple of months later, she writes that she’s finally started her revision. I write about this in much more detail in the book, but by comparing the two versions, we can see that she took out some of that personal material and added much more about the circumstances of the Nazi occupation.

JW: The thing that most excited me about this book at the outset was your choice to write it as a literary biography, focused on Anne Frank the writer and artist, rather than Anne Frank the historical figure. This is obviously your wheelhouse given your background, but it felt so fresh to me. The case you make in the book for Anne Frank the artist is rock solid, but I’m wondering if you had to do any convincing either of yourself or others before undertaking the book with this lens.

RF: It never occurred to me to approach her any other way! As I said above, I was fascinated by the idea that this book that we’ve known and loved for so long isn’t exactly what it appears to be. As other critics have also pointed out, it’s more of a memoir in diary form than a straightforward diary. The fact that Anne revised her diary for publication has been public knowledge for almost forty years, yet the myth-making around her is so powerful that it simply fails to penetrate. If readers take nothing else away from my book, I wanted them at least to understand that her diary wasn’t “found art” (as some readers have called it) but a deliberately constructed text of witness. 

JW: As I say in my review, you could’ve closed the book with Part I and we would have had a rich experience of re-seeing Anne Frank through this lens of literary biography, but you decided to extend the inquiry in Part II through a series of additional lenses. Where did this impulse come from, and maybe walk us through one of those lenses and how you developed your thinking that ultimately wound up in the book.

RF: My book is structured in two parts. Part I, titled Anne Frank, tells the story of her life; Part II, titled “Anne Frank,” in quotation marks, is a cultural history of the idea of her as it’s developed in the decades since her death. Most biographies end with the death of their subject, or shortly thereafter, but because Anne has had such an enduring afterlife as a public figure, it felt important to engage with that. 

I called the book The Many Lives of Anne Frank because each chapter offers a different way of looking at her. The early chapters are fairly straightforward: she’s a child growing up in Frankfurt, a refugee when the family moves to Amsterdam, a witness when she’s first in hiding. For her afterlife, I struggled a little over exactly how to conceptualize those identities. In the end, I wound up calling her an author when her father publishes the diary; a celebrity when Doubleday picks it up for the American market and makes it a bestseller; and an ambassador when the play and film adapted from it bring her story to a global audience. Then she’s a survivor in the many counter-historical works of fiction that have been written about her.

“Pawn,” which examines Anne’s role in the political arena, is the last chapter and the one I found most challenging to write. It looks at the way the diary has functioned in a few different political settings: Japan after World War II (where the book was a surprise bestseller), apartheid-era South Africa (it found its way to Robben Island, where anti-apartheid activists in prison passed it around), and finally Zionism and anti-Zionism. I initially thought about calling it, more generously, “Crusader” or “Activist.” But I settled on Pawn because of the way Anne ends up being used as a mouthpiece for or against causes that in reality she had nothing to do with.

JW: You’ve now done two literary biographies between The Many Lives of Anne Frank and Shirley Jackson: A Rather Haunted Life. What have these books taught you about bringing a writer’s life to life?

RF: Some biographies of writers include very little about their work, but for me that’s the heart of it. So much of a writer’s life is interior. Anne Frank, of course, was literally kept inside for almost the entire time that she was writing her diary, but Shirley Jackson too was a writer who did not have a typically exciting life. For each of them, I focused on getting as close as possible to their thoughts and feelings by looking at every possible clue, including the books they read, the movies they watched, the music they listened to, and anything else that might bring me deeper into their world.  

I’m always interested in the question of how books come to be written. What made this particular person create this work of art at this moment in time? It’s a combination of inspiration, personal history, and cultural and social dynamics. And some element of it will always be mysterious.

JW: And lastly, the same final question I ask everyone. What’s one book you think not a lot of people would know that you think they should read?

RF: A book I read for the first time while researching this one, despite it having been recommended to me by many people over the years, was the diary of Etty Hillesum, published in English as An Interrupted Life. A teacher and translator of Russian language and literature, Hillesum began writing her diary in March 1941 largely as a chronicle of a love affair and continued up until she was deported to Auschwitz in fall 1943. It couldn’t be more different from Anne Frank’s diary—for one thing, it’s both intensely erotic and deeply spiritual. But just as Anne wrote in July 1944, after spending two years in hiding, that people were “really good at heart,” Hillesum too continues to reaffirm her faith in humanity even at Westerbork, the transit camp where Jews from the Netherlands were sent. It’s an inspiring and moving text, and also gorgeously written.

Previous recent author Q&A’s:

Understanding Colson Whitehead with Derek C. Maus.

Humans Relate to Each Other And Understand Themselves in the Process with Adam Haslett.

The Name of This Band is R.E.M. with Peter Ames Carlin.

Echo Chambers of Our Own Devising with Charles Baxter.

Crime Novel? Women’s Fiction? Literary Thriller? with Kelsey Rae Dimberg.

Everybody Is Secretly Grieving with Alison Espach.

Observations Within Landscape with Ben Shattuck.

Teddy Wayne on Writing and “The Winner.”

Accomplishment vs. Achievement with Adam Gopnik