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How can autobiography be distinguished from fiction when the author of the text is unknown? This case study in biography, autobiography, fiction, and criticism explores one reader's "biographical desire," awakened by an anonymous manuscript, written in diary form, depicting a summer in the life of a young girl in the Finnish countryside of 1905.

Critical discussion of Etty Hillesum's diary has mostly concentrated on the Holocaust. This essay emphasizes the literariness of An Interrupted Life —symbols, metaphors, intertexts, and the sense of coherence—and examines the diary's relationship to spiritual autobiography, the bildungsroman, and (meta)fiction. Addressing simplified notions of the diary as a genre, the author argues that the "novelization" created by the act of publishing a (literary) diary is the product of the interplay between the scripts of the diarist, the editor, and the reader alike.

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