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When You Listen to This Song - Lola Lafon & Lauren Elkin

By Lola Lafon & Lauren Elkin

Release Date: 2025-11-18

Genre: Literary Criticism

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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.

When You Listen to This Song - Lola Lafon & Lauren Elkin

By Lola Lafon & Lauren Elkin

Release Date: 2025-11-18

Genre: Literary Criticism

(0 ratings)
Read Download
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.

More by Lola Lafon & Lauren Elkin

When You Listen to This Song

The Little Communist Who Never Smiled

Quand tu Ă©couteras cette chanson GRAND PRIX DES LECTRICES ELLE 2023

Sororité

La pequeña comunista que no sonreía nunca

Il n'a jamais été trop tard

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Zozobrar (AdN)

Als je naar dit lied luistert

A kis kommunista, aki sosem mosolygott

Cadere

Reeling

Reeling

Keď začujeĆĄ tĂșto pieseƈ

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Immer wenn ich dieses Lied höre

La bataille du rail - Cheminots en grĂšve, Ă©crivains solidaires

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