Kitty

The fictional friend

Kitty is not a real person, but Anne Frank's fictional friend, to whom she addresses her diary entries shortly after she begins writing them. The name is borrowed from a series of novels by the Dutch children's author Cissy van Marxveldt (1889-1948), in which the character Kitty is a funny girl with a knack for pranks.

Anne is troubled by loneliness even before she goes into hiding in the secret annex in July 1942. In real life, Anne lacks a friend in whom she can confide completely (cf. p. 8). To make up for this absence, she not only wants to write a diary, but deliberately address it to a friend she has imagined: 

To enhance the image of this long-awaited friend in my imagination, I don’t want to jot down the facts in this diary the way most people would do, but I w...