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Returning to The Diary of Anne Frank in 2026

I was young the first time I read Anne Frank’s now-famous diary--about the age that Anne herself was when she wrote it. That reading was haunted by the death that I knew awaited her, in Bergen-Belsen, when she was fifteen. And when I returned to her diary, now an adult myself, writing a book about female adolescence in literature, I was astonished to discover how much of life there was in that diary. Anne welcomed the bodily changes of puberty; she fell in love; her relationships with her parents were altered; she began to envision a future for herself as a writer. In the most harrowing, the most terrifying of circumstances, Anne emerges from the pages of her diary a model not just of normal but of healthy female development. It defies understanding.

I believe that what we have in The Diary of Anne Frank is the early work of a remarkable writer. Anne Frank of course can never change. But history changes and as individuals we change. I wish to return, in our present moment, to a third reading of her diary.