Please join First Light Books and Villa Albertine in welcoming author and philosopher Lola Lafon to Austin.

Tickets include a copy of the book and a reserved seat. Unreserved seats are available on a first come, first served basis. Free RSVPs are also encouraged.

About the book

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.

About the authors

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. She lives in Paris, France.

She will be joined in conversation by Ericka Knudson, a noted author and scholar on the French New Wave. She has published numerous articles on cinematic modernity, and the role of women and literature in the movement, as well as a pedagogical book on world cinema. She holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of Paris and has taught French film and media at Harvard University.