Kristin Harmel & Alice Hoffman on Anne Frank

A Conversation Hosted by Friends & Fiction

Scholastic Press just published the latest from Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic, The Dovekeepers, The Book of Magic), a searing novel called When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before The Diary, a moving story that traces the two years leading up to Anne Frank’s move into the secret annex with her family, as the world falls apart before her eyes. Suffused with hope and filled with deeply researched detail, the book is moving, inspiring, and heartbreaking all at once. Of course, the real-life Anne was tragically murdered in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in early 1945, at the age of just 15, but in this novel, she doesn’t know yet how her story will end, and she believes in a future that will never come to pass. Friends & Fiction co-host Kristin Harmel, who has also written many bestselling books about the period around the Holocaust, sat down with Alice to chat about the book, which serves as a prequel to Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl.

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Kristin Harmel: Alice, thanks so much for being with us. I absolutely loved the new book. I was obsessed with Anne Frank growing up, so much so that every single one of my books has a character with some version of the name Anne in honor of her. So let’s start off by talking a bit about how this project came about for you.

Alice Hoffman: It was really my editor in England and in the States at Scholastic. They approached me, and they had already gone to the Anne Frank House to discuss whether or not they’d be behind a project that was really a prequel, in a way, to the diary. And so they came to me. I’ve never been in those kinds of circumstances before. Just like you, I read (the diary) when I was about 12, and it impacted me hugely. It was the thing that made me feel like maybe I could be a writer.

KH: Same! That’s why I’ve put her in every one of my books, because that was the moment for me. That was the moment I realized books could change the world.

AH: Yeah, me too. And also, I had forgotten about this until after I finished the book, but I have a novel where there’s a 12-year-old girl who’s obsessed with Anne Frank. It’s called The Third Angel, and I’d totally forgotten that aspect of it. She’s just suffered a huge loss, and she keeps reading the diary over and over again, because I think the strange thing about (Anne Frank’s) diary is that it gives you hope. Despite what happened, it still manages to give you hope.

KH: I think it’s not just hope, but it’s an awareness of how interconnected we all are. She was someone from a different time, a different place, a different background, but I felt like I knew her as well as I knew myself when I read that diary.

AH: I know!

KH: And I think it reminds us that we’re all the same wherever we are.

AH: I mean, I think that’s what books do. I think that’s at the core of why people want to ban books, because books make you feel for people who aren’t like you. They make you have compassion. I felt the same way you did. I felt very much like I knew her intimately. But I also felt that she knew me, because I felt so many of the same feelings.

KH: Yes! I think the diary really allowed us to put ourselves in Anne’s shoes. It should be required reading for everybody, especially given how her story ended.

AH: Yes, my editor in England felt that her story was being forgotten. There’s a huge rise in antisemitism in England, and here in the States, and she felt that Anne’s story was not being taught like it used to be, and that it was being forgotten. So I understood why she felt like this was a good time for the book. I think it’s not being taught as much, and a lot of people don’t know who Anne Frank is.

KH: I agree, and I also think that in the world right now, we’re being told to step back into our own corners and only see the narrative that belongs in that corner. I feel like this is a book—both her book and your book, actually—they’re books that do the opposite. They unite us and bring us together.

AH: I wanted someone to finish my book and then read the diary and be encouraged to feel like they want to know more. These things are very easily forgotten. When I talk to Holocaust survivors, that’s the fear. They’re getting older and older and there aren’t that many left, and what happens when they’re gone? Who will tell their story? That’s one of the reasons I gave myself permission to tell the story; when I talked to Holocaust survivors, they felt it was very important to tell these stories.

KH: Did you have any reservations about taking on a story was already so personal to you? Beyond that, it’s about somebody who so many of us feel we know so intimately.

AH: Well, initially, I just said yes. It felt like such a full circle moment for me, who started to become a writer because of Anne, to kind of end my career with writing about her. It was something that was such an honor and something that in my wildest dreams as a kid reading the book, never did I think that this would ever happen. But once I said yes, I felt sort of the weight of the responsibility of her story and what an icon she is and how important she is to so many people. And I just thought, well, I’m just going to write it because she was important to me, and I’m not going to think beyond that.

KH: Her voice is one that feels so familiar to so many. So on the one hand, you had a model for how she thought and communicated. But I can also see that being a problem on the other hand. With so many people who felt so intimately familiar with her tone and her voice, getting her voice wrong here would have been jarring. So how did you go about getting her voice so right?

AH: I think that as a writer, you understand that. I felt like I couldn’t tell it in first person, because I think hers is the greatest first person narration in literature. So how do you get close to someone without telling it in first person? So I had to figure out different ways to get inside of her, and get close to her, and also, I didn’t re-read the diary. I fact-checked with it, but I didn’t re-read it, because I didn’t want to think about what happened when my book ended. I just wanted to be in the moment, so that was difficult. I found that I wrote a third person narrator that was very close to her, then I had an omniscient narrator, and then I had an even more personal narrator, telling the story as if you, the reader, were living it. I had three different versions of a point of view.

KH: It still felt very much like her voice and spirit were there in your pages. It had been years since I’d read her diary, and it brought it all back to me. I think you wrote a character who was very consistent with what we know about her.

AH: I think one of the things I thought about when I was writing the book is that part of why we feel so close to her is that she’s both ordinary and extraordinary. She’s both. And I think most of us feel that way about ourselves as well. She had a way of telling a story that brought you in very closely. She was writing the diary to an imaginary best friend, and I think we became that imaginary best friend.

KH: That’s so true. Can you talk a little bit about the research you did to bring this story alive?

AH: I did it in cycles, because when you’re writing a historical novel, you can get stuck in the research forever.

KH: Oh my gosh, tell me about it!

AH: Right? So I did an initial big reading of everything I could find written about her, and then I went to Amsterdam and worked with the Anne Frank House and kind of trailed her footsteps before they went into the attic. I went to the Frank house, which was an extremely emotional experience. I went to the bookstore where her father, Otto Frank, had bought the diary, and to the Montessori school that she went to, which is still there. It was really emotional, because it was a nice neighborhood when they lived there, and it’s still a nice neighborhood. There’s a park in the middle, and it made it feel very present, like it wasn’t ancient history. In her house, they let various writers from other countries stay there and write, and they offered the house to me and my friend to stay in while we were there, but I didn’t think I could do it. I thought it would be too emotional to sleep there. But there’s a flat roof there, and there’s a photograph of Anne reading in a beach chair out on the roof, and to stand there where I’d seen that photograph of her was just very, very intense.

KH: I’ve been to the Anne Frank House, too, and I agree with you about the intensity. To think that her story survived, and she didn’t, is just heartbreaking in a way I can’t fully put into words.

AH: But one of the things that’s positive is that she wanted to be a writer—she wanted to be a great writer—and she is. There’s that part of it, which I think makes you feel better than you would. While I was there, I talked to a lot of historians and researchers, and one of them told me that there were so many teenagers hidden at the same time in the same area, and so many wrote diaries. I mean, Anne’s sister wrote a diary that was lost. But there’s something about her book that has become sort of the voice of the war. And I think part of it is that she’s such a good writer.

KH: Speaking of that, that thread really runs through your novel. We see her beginning to explore her love of stories and of books and of writing. It felt so important in the narrative. Can you tell us how you put that together?

AH: When I was researching, I realized she had been writing all along, really, and that her father also wrote fairy tales. They had a very big connection through literature. He had studied mythology at university, and it was a connection between them that was important, so I used some of that in my thinking about who she was and what their relationship was.

KH: It was really beautifully done, Alice. Can you talk a bit about the importance of getting a book like this into the hands of a middle grade reader at this moment in time? It’s a book that appeals very much to adults, but it’s also geared toward middle grade readers.

AH: I always feel that when I’m writing for children or young adults, I’m writing for everyone, because I feel like I’m writing for my 12- or 16-year-old self. But I especially think that it’s good for middle school children because when I was starting the book, I have a niece who lives in Vienna—she’s Austrian—and I was telling her about the book, and I was telling her about Anne Frank, and she had never heard of Anne Frank. I thought oh gosh, she doesn’t know this? I think there are a lot of people who are 11 or 12 who don’t know anything about this. That was one of the other reasons I wanted to write the book.

KH: Did you go back and read the diary after you finished the book?

AH: No. I kind of stopped where my novel stopped, because I felt like Anne didn’t know the end, so writing the book, I couldn’t really know the end. I had to almost forget what the end of it was.

KH: Did writing the book change the way you looked at Anne Frank at all?

AH: I had always thought of her as perfect, and that changed because I found out things like that she was annoying, that people didn’t like her, that she was bossy, she had ambition, she was difficult—and that made me like her even more.

KH: I loved that about her in your story, too. What do you hope readers get out of this book?

AH: I hope it sends people back to the diary, but I also think it’s a story about having compassion. It’s a very specific story about a specific time and place about a Jewish girl and Nazis and World War II, but it’s also something other than that, which is a reminder that this is happening in a different way in many places in the world today. Someone told me at the Anne Frank House that there’s a group here in America who delivered Anne’s diary to girls in Afghanistan, and it made perfect sense that girls would relate to her there.

KH: It should be required reading for all of us, around the world, at this moment in time, honestly. Okay, let’s end with two October-specific questions. First, like me, you are a breast cancer survivor. And since October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, and since the majority of our members here at Friends & Fiction are women, do you have a message you’d like us to bear in mind?

AH: One message is how important testing is. Breast cancer is more and more curable. I worked with my local hospital to create a breast center (the Hoffman Breast Center at Mount Auburn Hospital in Cambridge, Mass.), and the survival rate is really good. It’s important to get tested and to ask for what you want, even if your particular doctor thinks you don’t need a mammogram until later. The testing is really important.

KH: I agree completely. All right, now with Halloween around the corner, many of us will be watching Practical Magic, which is, of course, based on one of your novels. I know there’s a sequel in the works. Is there anything you can tell us about that?

AH: I just know that there’s a screenwriter hired, one of the writers who worked on the first movie, and I know that Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman want to do it, which is amazing. And I think they’re going to be using The Book of Magic, which is the last book in the series, where the sisters are older, and Sally’s daughters are grown up, and it’s about breaking the curse, how do you break the generational curse? It has such a huge fan base, and it means so much to so many people. Hopefully they’ll go ahead with it.

KH: I can’t wait to see it. Thank you so much for being with us, Alice!

AH: Thanks! Nice to talk to you!

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About the Author

Alice Hoffman is the highly acclaimed author of over thirty novels for readers of all ages, including The Dovekeepers, The World That We Knew -- winner of the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, The Marriage of Opposites, Practical Magic, Incantation, The Foretelling, and most recently, The Invisible Hour. Her previous novels for Scholastic Press are Aquamarine, which was made into a major motion picture, Indigo, Green Witch, and Green Angel, which Publishers Weekly, in a starred review, called "achingly lovely." She lives outside of Boston.

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About the Book

Bestselling author Alice Hoffman delivers a stunning novel about one of contemporary history's most acclaimed figures, exploring the little-known details of Anne Frank's life before she went into hiding.

Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl has captivated and inspired readers for decades. Published posthumously by her bereaved father, Anne's journal, written while she and her family were in hiding during World War II, has become one of the central texts of the Jewish experience during the Holocaust, as well as a work of literary genius.

With the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, the Frank family's life is turned inside out, blow by blow, restriction by restriction. Prejudice, loss, and terror run rampant, and Anne is forced to bear witness as ordinary people become monsters, and children and families are caught up in the inescapable tide of violence.

In the midst of impossible danger, Anne, audacious and creative and fearless, discovers who she truly is. With a wisdom far beyond her years, she will become a writer who will go on to change the world as we know it.

Critically acclaimed author Alice Hoffman weaves a lyrical and heart-wrenching story of the way the world closes in on the Frank family from the moment the Nazis invade the Netherlands until they are forced into hiding, bringing Anne to bold, vivid life.

Based on extensive research and published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, When We Flew Away is an extraordinary and moving tour de force.

Perfect for Alice Hoffman fans and readers of every age.

“Adding new poignance to a story whose ending we already knew, Alice Hoffman has deftly recreated the child Anne Frank with all her wit, mischief, and uncertainties. This fictionalized account of the increasingly desperate years that preceded the famous diary breaks readers’ hearts one more time. But it reminds us of how important it is to remember and honor all that was lost.”
— Lois Lowry, Newbery Award-winning author of Number the Stars

“We can highly recommend Alice Hoffman's novel of Anne Frank's life, set in the dramatic and terrible circumstances of those first war years. We hope it will persuade young readers that contributing to a better world is both necessary and possible.”
—Ronald Leopold, Executive Director, Anne Frank House

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