You can find uncensored copies (or at least, as uncensored as possible) online. I read the version as close to her original diary as I could find, and it included a forward about Anne’s father and how he had edited it before the diary’s release to the public in order to protect Anne’s name from slander. It’s fascinating to read and really it’s very similar to other coming-of-age stories, with the added appeal of it being an actual diary written by a Jewish teenager during the tumultuous time of WWII. (Her father abridged her diary to protect her privacy and make her message more palatable to some; additionally, Anne edited her own diary - some texts were pasted over and rewritten.)
***Annie’s father once said in an interview that when her diary was first published in the 1940s the content would have been so controversial he thought it would hurt the primary reason he was releasing them in the first place. Anne wanted to be a writer when she grew up and he knew the G-rated content would be well received. ***
It’s funny how when a straight 15-year-old declares that they are attracted to members of the opposite sex, nobody writes long, multi-paragraph comments to say “wait, wait, not so fast…” NOBODY questions the crushes of straight kids even before they’re teenagers, but they question the expressly stated preferences of TEENAGE LGBTQ people. And even into their 20s.
Goodbye to Alice Reasoner, who says tragedy makes her sick, who says never give in but always go down fighting, who says take them with you, who says die if you must but loop your own intestines around the neck of your strangling enemy.
Goodbye to everything. Goodbye to Janet, whom we don’t believe in and whom we deride but who is in secret our savior from utter despair, who appears Heaven-high in our dreams with a mountain under each arm and the ocean in her pocket, Janet who comes from the place where the labia of sky and horizon kiss each other so that Whileawayans call it The Door and know that all legendary things come therefrom. Radiant as the day, the Might-be of our dreams, living as she does in a blessedness none of us will ever know, she is nonetheless Everywoman. Goodbye, Jeannine, goodbye, poor soul, poor girl, poor as-I-once-was. Goodbye, goodbye. Remember: we will all be changed. In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, we will all be free. I swear it on my own head. I swear it on my ten fingers. We will be ourselves. Until then I am silent; I can no more. I am God’s typewriter and the ribbon is typed out.
Go, little book, trot through Texas and Vermont and Alaska and Maryland and Washington and Florida and Canada and England and France; bob a curtsey at the shrines of Friedan, Millet, Greer, Firestone, and all the rest; behave yourself in people’s living rooms, neither looking ostentatious on the coffee table nor failing to persuade due to the dullness of your style; knock at the Christmas garland on my husband’s door in New York City and tell him that I loved him truly and love him still (despite what anybody may think); and take your place bravely on the book racks of bus terminals and drugstores. Do not scream when you are ignored, for that will alarm people, and do not fume when you are heisted by persons who will not pay, rather rejoice that you have become so popular. Live merrily, little daughter-book, even if I can’t and we can’t; recite yourself to all who will listen; stay hopeful and wise. Wash your face and take your place without a fuss in the Library of Congress, for all books end up there eventually, both little and big. Do not complain when at last you become quaint and old-fashioned, when you grow as outworn as the crinolines of a generation ago and are classed with Spicy Western Stories, Elsie Dinsmore, and The Son of the Sheik; do not mutter angrily to yourself when young persons read you to hrooch and hrch and guffaw, wondering what the dickens you were all about. Do not get glum when you are no longer understood, little book. Do not curse your fate. Do not reach up from readers’ laps and punch the readers’ noses.
