With new novel about Anne Frank, author Alice Hoffman honors her 12-year-old self

When an editor asked Alice Hoffman to write a novel about Anne Frank, the prolific author didn’t think of the complexity of the research or the enormity of the subject matter.

She just thought of herself at age 12, discovering Frank’s “The Diary of a Young Girl.”

That was the book that taught her that a young Jewish girl could be a writer. That a book could be brave. That she was not alone.

“So I said yes, without really thinking,” Hoffman said via Zoom from her Cambridge, Mass., home. But she knew: “This is what my grandmother would want me to do.”

Her grandmother had been her biggest champion and first storyteller. Sitting together on a bus in New York City, Lillie spun tales of her childhood in Russia and Ukraine, of breaking river ice to scoop water, of witches and birds and wolves.

Wolves stalk the edges of “When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary,” Hoffman’s researched imagining of Frank’s life in Amsterdam from 1940 to 1942.

“It was May 11, the day after the unexpected had already happened,” she writes in the book’s beginning, after the bombs drop. “They listened to the radio, they heard what sounded like stars crashing to earth, and when night fell and the black moth appeared at the window, no one saw it, no one heard it tapping on the glass.”

It wouldn’t be a Hoffman novel without a bit of magic. But with this young adult novel, out this month, the mythic elements help capture a reality too terrible to be true. The 72-year-old author, whose bestsellers include “Practical Magic” and “The Dovekeepers,” will speak Sept. 26 at the Fitzgerald Theater as part of Talking Volumes’ 25th season.

It was, of course, a tall order — to reframe Anne Frank’s journal, which Frank wrote while she and her family were hiding from Nazis during World War II, and which Frank’s bereaved father, Otto, published after her death. For months, Hoffman had run up against the project’s constraints. Among them: It didn’t make sense to write in first person, her natural inclination, because “Anne is the best first-person voice in literature.”

Then she started treating the story like a fairy tale.

Hoffman had always felt, growing up, that “nonfiction was a lie and fiction was the truth, and fairy tales were really the deepest truths.” Not Disney but the “more brutal, more bloody, more honest, more psychologically true” stories of the Brothers Grimm.

Recently, Hoffman read about a study that some 85% of the heroes in fairy tales are girls.

“As a child reader, that’s what attracted me to them, that they were active participants,” Hoffman said. “Yes, there’s Sleeping Beauty. But there is also Gretel.”

As a kid in Franklin Square, N.Y., Hoffman was forever toting a book. She found a copy of “The Catcher in the Rye” on her mother’s bookshelf. She came across Ray Bradbury in a box that her father left behind in the basement, when he took off for good. And she found Anne Frank at a book fair.

“It seems like it’s magic, but there are certain books ... that speak to you, that make you feel known in some way,” Hoffman said, as her sheepdog Shelby scurried by behind her. “You feel like that person understands you, that book understands you. I think that’s why I feel so strongly that kids should be able to go into libraries and just read whatever they want and pick whatever they pick, because you never know which of those books is going to be the book where you find yourself.”

Hoffman “left high school early, skipped college, then went to night school before heading to graduate school in California,” she wrote in a Modern Love essay a few years back.

During her first writing workshop at Stanford, the writer and critic Albert Guerard assigned the class to write 50 pages a week, Hoffman told the New York Times in 2014. The students turned in dozens of pages, but their instructor hadn’t been serious. “Guerard was just letting us know that writers write,” Hoffman said.

In the years since, Hoffman has taken that assignment to heart. She has written 32 novels for adults and nine for young adults. So many that at one point during our conversation, she was not sure if she was quoting another writer — or herself. So many that she had forgotten, until recently, that another one of her novels, “The Third Angel,” featured a sorrowful girl who reads and rereads Anne Frank’s diary.

Still, she worries that there are too many stories to tell, too many characters to depict. How could she get to them all over a single lifetime? “There’s never going to be enough time.”

Much of her success stems from “Practical Magic,” which became a 1998 movie (panned by critics and loved by fans) that starred Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman as the Owens sisters. “For more than two hundred years, the Owens women have been blamed for everything that has gone wrong in town,” both the book and the film begin.

On Instagram and in conversation, Hoffman has embraced the moment that film is having, thanks to its witchiness, its 1990s soundtrack and its focus on sisterhood. The film’s sequel, which draws from Hoffman’s follow-up novel, “The Book of Magic,” finally, is in the works.

“I think it really spoke to a lot of women and girls of all different ages, saying something that other books and movies weren’t saying,” Hoffman said.

And what was it saying?

“Rescue yourself,” Hoffman replied with a crooked smile.

Hoffman’s writing explores and celebrates the complex relationships between mothers and daughters, sisters and friends. Her Modern Love essay, in 2021, made that explicit. It told the story of Hoffman and her friend walking through their neighborhood, “talking nonstop,” when they were in kindergarten, then in adulthood.

When Hoffman’s husband left her, that friend “helped me through the wreckage of my marriage with nightly phone calls for a year,” she wrote. After her friend’s husband died, they talked again, then walked again.

“Even though she was in the throes of grief, I knew how grateful she was for her long marriage,” she wrote, “just as I knew despite the difference in our fortunes there had been another love story, one we had shared for more than 60 years.”

“When We Flew Away” also explores the tensions and intimacies that Anne might have shared with her mother, Edith, her older sister, Margot, and her Oma, or grandmother. Working on the book, which Hoffman published in cooperation with the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Hoffman drew from several archives, including Otto Frank’s letters trying, ever more desperately, to get his family out of Nazi-occupied Amsterdam and to safety.

In Amsterdam, Hoffman visited Frank’s school and saw her desk. She stopped inside the bookstore where Anne got her red-checked diary. She visited not only the Anne Frank House but the apartment where the Frank family lived before they went into hiding.

That apartment houses writers on fellowship, but Hoffman couldn’t stay there. In fact, “I could only stay there for so long without having to go outside.”

“It’s so normal,” she said, drawing out the word. “It’s such a nice neighborhood with nice, normal apartments and children playing on the street, and then all of a sudden, you know, it’s a nightmare.” Being there, “I could imagine how you go from life being normal to it changing slowly — and then all at once, it’s terrifying, and it happens all over the world.”

“When We Flew Away” emphasizes the details of that normalcy, pressing them up against an ever-darkening sky. “Blackberry jam was Anne’s favorite. Apple was next.”

Hoffman hopes that the novel leaves readers with the urge to pick up “The Diary of a Young Girl,” for the first time or the 10th.

She believes she’s the same person who dove into the diary six decades ago. A voracious reader and an unhappy soul who, like Frank herself, longed to be a writer.

“It’s kind of finishing something I began as a 12-year-old,” Hoffman said, her voice catching, “having that dream that was a dream that she had, too.”

Excerpt from Alice Hoffman’s new novel ‘When We Flew Away’

In Germany, before 1933, some Jews didn’t see what was happening at first. The changes were nearly invisible before then, shadows you could only see from the corner of your eye. The Germans put on a play, a pantomime of what was to come, separation for the good of the nation. Then the curtain dropped, and people saw what was before them. There it was, the evil that had been there all along was revealed to one and all. The storm troopers with their Nazi armbands, the Jews beaten and murdered, the children crying, the wind in the trees that sounded as if the whole world had been broken in two and nothing could put it back together again.

“No one knows what will happen,” Oma told her darling Anne. “The future is a mystery.”

Oma averted her eyes and made a sound in her throat that almost sounded as if she were choking on her own words. It was hard not to tell her granddaughter the truth, but she couldn’t be sure of what would come to be. Why should she upset Anne when she might well be wrong about the future she feared was lurking close by, echoing what had happened to the Jews in Germany? Still, Oma shivered as she thought of the link between the past she had known to the future they were about to enter. How do you tell your granddaughter that life can be tragic for no reason? How do you say that to any decent person who wants to believe that life is fair?

“My parents say we’ll be fine.” Anne wasn’t sure whether or not she believed them, but she knew that Oma would never lie to her; that was why she had come to speak to her grandmother. “Is what they say true?”

“The truth can be many things.” Oma shrugged. Lately, her hands had begun to shake and she no longer took up her embroidery. “We can never know the future.”

“But what do you think?” Anne asked.

“I think you’ll grow up to be a beautiful woman,” Oma told her.

Anne laughed then. She couldn’t help herself. It was so like Oma to give her a compliment, even in the midst of a serious discussion. “You only think I’m beautiful because I’m your granddaughter! Thank you, Oma, but I know I’m not, and frankly I don’t care. I want more than that.”

Oma was always intrigued by her younger granddaughter, who was unafraid to speak out. Yes, Anne could be opinionated, but she was brave as well, and she saw the world in her own way. How lovely that the way things looked wasn’t what meant most to her. How deeply her granddaughter looked at the world.

“What is it that you want?” Oma asked, curious. It was almost as if they were both girls in this moment, peering into the future together, imagining what it might bring.

“I don’t know yet,” Anne admitted. She was just a girl who knew so little of the world. She was at the end of something and at the beginning of something. Still, it was just a matter of time before she knew exactly who she wished to be.

Excerpted from “When We Flew Away: A Novel of Anne Frank Before the Diary” by Alice Hoffman. Reprinted with permission of Scholastic Press.

Talking Volumes with Alice Hoffman

Who: Sponsored by the Minnesota Star Tribune and MPR.

When: 7 p.m. Sept. 26.

Where: Fitzgerald Theater, 10 E. Exchange St., St. Paul.

Tickets: $32.50. mprevents.org.