Anne's diary begins just as Anne hits adolescence. She tells us that “Writing in a diary is a really strange experience for someone like me. Not only because I've never written anything before, but also because it seems to me that later on neither I nor anyone else will be interested in the musings of a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Oh well, it doesn't matter. I feel like writing, and I have an even greater need to get all kinds of things off my chest.”
Although she is living the extraordinary circumstances of hiding in an annex from German persecution, Anne faces the many normal problems of any bright-eyed thirteen year old. Anne begins to mature emotionally and physically, and recognizes her limitations to understanding adulthood when she first began writing her diary. In one entry, she shows that her younger self has deepened "I wouldn't be able to write that kind of thing anymore," she says. "My descriptions are so indelicate."
Anne matures over the course of the Diary into a deeper more realistic woman. Anne begins as an optimistic young girl who, with the passing of time, reflects on her place in the world and is quick to challenge views and argue with the other residents in the annex. As she tells us on page 142, “Sometimes I think God is trying to test me, both now and in the future. I'll have to become a good person on my own, without anyone to serve as a model or advise me, but it'll make me stronger in the end.”
