Join us on Thursday, November 20 from 2:00–4:00 pm for a reception in celebration of the library reopening its doors to researchers and community members. As centerpiece of the celebration, French author Lola Lafon will present a discussion of her book, When You Listen To This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing.

 

In 2021, 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. Lola 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,” the author writes. “Some urgency dwelled at the heart of the Annex, crouched there, ready to be discovered.”

 

Lola 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, Lola Lafon reflects on what it means to lose loved ones, both Lola Lafon’s own family in the Holocaust and her childhood friend to the Khmer Rouge. A prize-winner 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.

 

The event will take place in the Library on the third floor. Light refreshments will be served.