The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)

_Dear Kitty_, she wrote again and again, to an imaginary confidante a thirteen-year-old conjured because there was no one her own age to tell. For two years Anne Frank lived behind a hinged bookcase in an Amsterdam annex, eight people forbidden to flush a toilet or speak above a whisper while the warehouse below did business. What she set down is not the voice of a martyr but of a real girl: vain about her looks, savage about her mother, dizzy over the boy upstairs, fiercely sure she would become a writer. She knew the diary mattered and revised it herself for a book she meant to publish after the war. From the attic she could see one chestnut tree, and she wrote about its blossom as though the world were still hers. The last entry is dated August 1, 1944. Then it stops, mid-life, where the life was meant to keep going.