It started at the Brooklyn birthday party of a dubious literary critic, an event where a sizable portion of the guests were cancelled men. From authors to journalists to podcasters, it was a who’s who of fallen Twitter stars crammed into a Park Slope bar garden, drinking beer and talking about themselves. As a plus-one of a friend looking for a new job, I assumed it would be an anthropological affair.
Of the two men I spoke to, one was dissolved online within days – taken to task very publicly for impropriety in his niche publishing job. The other, however, I sparked with. A few dates later, we found ourselves on the hallmark trip of a fresh New York relationship: a weekend away upstate. A tiny town, autumn foliage, tidy galleries, all ideal. After having sex, we found ourselves sitting on a sofa talking about life. Then a moment – one that all women fear – emerged. Gazing at me, he said: ‘I want to say something but it’s going to sound a little weird.’ Alone, in the woods, a non-driver, my mind raced: was he married? Was he religious? Was he about to murder me, and would my murder be the subject of one of those true-crime podcasts I despised? Of course, I demurred. ‘Go on, say!’ He trod water, not wanting to commit.
Then he came out with it, his face a picture of complete sincerity: ‘In a certain light, you really look like Anne Frank.’ Anne Frank. Now, I am an Indian-British woman in my mid-30s, so I could only respond, ‘the famously dead child?’ He doubled down. ‘It was a certain light, a certain angle. Your hair was just so. She was also a prolific writer, too!’ He scrambled for a photo on his phone.
There are a handful of photos of Anne that are known to exist. You’ve likely seen all of them. They are all in black and white, with her hair always in a dark bob, deeply parted. She sports a wide smile. She has thick eyebrows that sit over her deep-set eyes. She wears a mix of cardigans and dresses with stiff Peter Pan collars. She is very clearly a child in all of these photos.
I read The Diary of Anne Frank as a teenager – like we all did – and Anne has always held some space in my mind. However, until that moment when a Google Images page of Anne Frank photos was presented to me, I hadn’t really thought about her for some time.
When I got back to New York, I started telling the story to friends and colleagues, and some strange things started to happen.
Acquaintances started putting together side-by-side image comparisons of me and Anne’s most famous image, where she is poised at her desk. My male Jewish friends seemed to take the most pleasure in this, finding the whole thing hilarious. They presented the images at their bachelor parties and reunions and often sent me the reviews. Friends started sending me snapshots of the book in the wild from all over the world. Anne Frank-related messages would come in daily.
As she became a bigger part of my life, it became apparent how many other women had been told by men that they, too, looked like Anne Frank. On Zoom, one LA-based development executive told me how a boy in her high school had told her she looked like ‘a homely Anne Frank’. In London, an entertainment agent told me how strangers DMed her on Instagram, telling her she looked like Anne. A New York yoga teacher told me she often gets likened to Anne, which she laughed off and assumed was due to her dark circles. A friend sent me a screenshot of a woman who had liked him on Hinge, who captioned a photo of herself hiding behind a fridge with ‘Sexy Anne Frank’. In a New York magazine listicle about etiquette, writer Rachel Sugar wrote of how often she experiences this comparison, which she noted has led her to evaluate ‘the relative appeal of a pubescent victim of the Holocaust’.
