Who Was Kitty in Anne Frank's Diary?

2026-10-15 · Yesterself

Most people meet the name in the first line they ever read of the diary. Not a date, not a scene, but a greeting: Dear Kitty. And then a girl talking to someone, easily, as if that someone were sitting across the table waiting to hear how the day went.

Kitty was not sitting across the table. Kitty did not exist.

Where the name came from

Anne Frank was a reader of the Joop ter Heul books, a series of Dutch novels for girls by Cissy van Marxveldt. They were light, funny, chatty books, and their heroine, Joop, has a circle of friends. Among them is a girl named Kitty. Large parts of the series are written as letters, which matters more than the name does: Anne had a model in front of her for what it looks like when a girl tells her life to a friend on paper.

She borrowed more than one name at first. In the diary she writes to several invented girls in turn, each getting a letter, the whole cast lifted out of the books she liked. Then the others fall away and Kitty remains. From that point on, the diary has a single standing correspondent.

There was a real girl called Kitty Egyedi in Anne's wider circle before the war, and the coincidence has kept people arguing for decades. Egyedi herself, years later, did not believe the diary was addressed to her. Anne's own framing is the better evidence. She wanted a friend of the kind she felt she did not have, and she made one.

What she actually did on the page

Here is the part usually skipped, and the part that is worth borrowing.

The diary did not begin addressed. The first entries are ordinary diary entries: a birthday, presents, school, who said what. Only some months later does the greeting appear, and the writing changes shape when it does.

Then there is the second layer. Later, hearing a radio broadcast asking Dutch people to preserve their wartime documents, Anne went back and rewrote her diary as a book meant for readers. She cut, expanded, renamed people, tightened scenes. The two versions of the diary sit on top of one another in the editions we read now. The letter form survived that rewrite. She could have converted the whole thing to plain narrative and did not. The imagined reader was not scaffolding she outgrew. It was the shape of the thing.

What a named reader does to writing

You can test this yourself in an evening, which is the main reason to write about it at all.

Take a day you have already journaled. Write it again, this time opening with Dear and a name that is not yours. Notice what changes without your deciding it:

• You start explaining. An unaddressed entry says "the meeting was the same as always." An addressed one has to say what "always" means, because the reader was not at the last one either. You end up recording the thing you assumed you would remember.
• You introduce people. Initials and shorthand give way to "my sister, who has been unbearable since August." Future you, reading in five years, has forgotten exactly the details the imagined reader needs.
• You finish sentences. Writing to no one, you can trail off mid-thought and the page will not complain. Writing to someone, trailing off feels rude, so you push one clause further, and the last clause is often the one that mattered.
• You get a tone. Complaint aimed at nobody curdles. Complaint aimed at a patient friend turns into a story, sometimes a funny one, because you can hear how it sounds as you write it.
• You risk performing. This is the real cost. If the reader you picture is a judge, or a biographer, or somebody you would like to impress, the entry bends toward being impressive and away from being true.

That last point decides how well the device works for you. The whole trick rests on choosing a reader who is easy to tell things to.

Choosing an addressee that works

A few practical criteria, learned mostly by getting them wrong:

1. Not someone living who might read it. A real friend or partner as addressee silently edits every difficult sentence. Even if they will never see the page, you write around them.
2. Not a version of yourself you are afraid of. "Dear future me who has finally got it together" produces excuses, not entries.
3. Slightly outside your world. The reader should not know your coworkers, your street, or your family history. That ignorance is the engine — it makes you supply detail you would otherwise skip.
4. Patient and unshockable. Whatever else you invent about them, invent that.
5. Stable. One reader, kept for months, accumulates a shared history with you. You can write "you remember what I said about the job" and mean it. That accumulation is most of the value, and switching addressees every week destroys it.

Some people use a name. Some use a role: an old teacher who never taught them, a grandchild not yet born, a stranger a century from now. Some address the diary itself. It does not seem to matter much which, as long as it stays put.

The other reader you already have

There is a second addressee available to anyone who journals, and unlike Kitty this one is real: yourself, later.

The difficulty is that this reader is invisible while you write. You cannot picture them, so you write as though nobody will ever come. Then a year passes, you open an old entry, and you find a page full of pronouns with no referents and a mood with no cause.

Writing to a named someone fixes that almost by accident. The explanations you produce for an imaginary friend are exactly the explanations your later self will need. Anne's rewrite makes this visible: the version she prepared for readers is also, incidentally, the version that survives being read decades later by people who were not there.

This is roughly the premise Yesterself is built on. It is a journaling app — not released yet, waiting list only — where the writing is arranged as correspondence: each morning it delivers one letter drawn from your own past writing, and your evening reply becomes tomorrow's mail. You can also postmark a sentence to a specific future date and have it arrive then. The archive is end-to-end encrypted, there is no account or email or password, and export is free forever. It does not invent Kitty for you. It just makes the other end of the letter someone who actually exists.

If you try it tonight

Write one entry with a greeting at the top. Don't announce the experiment to yourself, don't plan the reader's biography, just pick a name and start telling them about Tuesday.

Read it back in the morning next to an ordinary entry. One of them will be clearer. If you skip a night, or a week, nothing breaks — the reader you invented is not keeping score, which is another quiet argument for inventing one.

Common questions

Was Kitty a real person?

Kitty was a fictional addressee. The name comes from a character in the Joop ter Heul novels by Cissy van Marxveldt, which Anne Frank read and loved. A real acquaintance named Kitty Egyedi existed, but Anne herself described the diary letters as written to an imagined friend.

Did Anne Frank write to Kitty from the very first page?

No. The earliest entries are not addressed to anyone in particular. She began writing letters to a set of invented girls some months in, and later settled on Kitty alone.

Why did she use a made-up reader instead of writing to herself?

A named reader gives writing a direction. It forces you to explain, to introduce people, to finish the thought instead of trailing off, because someone who was not there has to follow it.

Should I invent an addressee for my own journal?

Try it for a week and compare. Addressed entries tend to be clearer and more narrative. Unaddressed entries tend to be rawer. Neither is better in general, and you can keep both.

Does an imagined reader make a journal less honest?

It can, if you pick a reader you want to impress. Choosing a reader who is patient and not easily shocked usually improves honesty rather than reducing it.