Yael van der Wouden interview: ‘For a long time, my relationship to literature was pretty flat’

The author of The Safekeep, longlisted for the Booker Prize 2024, talks about reimagining personal and national narratives, and the book from last year’s Booker shortlist that she can’t get out of her head

Read interviews with all of the longlisted authors here.

Published August 15, 2024

The inspirations behind my Booker-longlisted book

There are so many answers to this question! A short story I once wrote about three siblings out for dinner and the additional girlfriend everyone hates; a fascination with how the Dutch narrativise national histories; my obsession with homes and the fantasy of owning a home; wanting to explore desire as the flipside of repulsion. The way it happened was like this: I was in the car on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.

The book that made me fall in love with reading

That would be the first novel I ever read: Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. I was ten and not much of a reader at all. That summer we spent a few months with my grandparents in the middle of a Dutch forest. I was bored out of my mind and picked up Burnett’s novel – half ironically – out of sheer desperation for entertainment. It worked. It was escape and it was comfort and recognition, a high I’ve been chasing with each book I read.

The book that made me want to become a writer

For a long time, my relationship to literature was pretty flat: either I saw myself in a main character, and if I didn’t, I’d re-imagine the narrative in my mind and insert myself within it. The first novel I read that made me see there was so much more to writing than the me/not me dichotomy was Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. The question of who a story is about is flipped on its head in that novel, and I was endlessly thrilled by it. I’d take it with me to places, quote parts of it out loud at random, and in the true fashion of an obsessed 17-year-old, wrote Foer a letter on my grandfather’s typewriter.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters — *Fingersmith* by Sarah Waters

The book I return to time and time again

Maurice by E.M. Forster. There’s something deeply satisfying about the arch of it to me – the way your own desire gets tripped up as a reader, where you think you’re rooting for these two characters, but find out that in fact what you’re rooting for is the happiness of both, and that they won’t find it in one another. The way Forster writes yearning is unparalleled. When I want to read something that’ll leave me with a melancholic sense that good people and good choices exist, then I read Maurice. I do it often in the summer, often when I miss a younger, more romantic version of myself.

The book I can’t get out of my head

Zadie Smith’s collection, Changing My Mind. I first read it when I realised that at some point I was going to have to aim to finish a written work and then do something with that finished work. A terrifying prospect. Smith’s essays were an eternal companion in that, and still are: getting to read about one of your favourite author’s own writing processes, about her struggles and her thoughts on your other favourite novelists. Returning to Changing My Mind is like returning to a good conversation with a favourite friend, who’s somehow also a brilliant lecturer and a writing buddy all at once. A precious thing.

The book that changed the way I think about the world

Miranda July’s The First Bad Man. The most fascinating and unsettling and somehow still deeply recognisable exploration of desire and queer desire I’ve ever read. The main character’s longing is redirected through imaginary fantasies of others, or the fantasy that she could be someone else. And then there’s the form and language, which surprised me continuously. It made me feel weirder than I perhaps am and less alone than I thought I was.

In the true fashion of an obsessed 17-year-old, I wrote Jonathan Safran Foer a letter on my grandfather’s typewriter

— Yael van der Wouden

The book that changed the way I think about the novel

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. It’s been a year and I’ve not stopped thinking, talking, preaching about The Bee Sting. Several hours’ worth of voice notes have been sent around to my friends about The Bee Sting. I didn’t know character work could do what it did; I didn’t know a 600-page family drama could be the most intense page-turner I’d ever read. I didn’t know reading about a teenage boy could be physically painful. I just didn’t know anyone could do what this novel did until I read it, and now I’m still reeling.

The book that impressed me the most

In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado. Impressed in an emotionally literal way – it left behind an impression of itself on my personality. Another one of those books where I finished it and thought, I didn’t know this was possible. An ingenious reinvention of the memoir as a form. And perhaps most importantly: it made me understand the dynamics of abuse not simply in a ‘beware of the boogeyman!’ way, but in a ‘learn from this, don’t become the boogeyman’ way. One of the most emotionally important books I’ve ever read.

The book I’m reading at the moment

I just finished Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor – a gorgeous and heartbreaking glimpse into the slow decay of an island off the coast of Wales in the late 1930s. There’s a thrill that comes in reading someone’s work and taking notes of all the phrases that made you jealous and thankful all at once. I wept a little at a description of a sleeping younger sibling. One of those novels where you finish and then all you want to do is take the writer out for a drink and ask them a million questions.

The Booker-nominated book everyone should read

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2002. A personal classic in the sense that it’s defined so much of my writing and my subsequent reading and also a little bit of who I turned out to be as a person. A twisty story where the plot itself has to unfold alongside the characters’ development—they meet, their meeting changes something fundamental about them, and through their change we come to understand why the whole plot hinges on them being static and unchangeable. Deeply romantic and very clever and has terrible women kiss each other on the mouth. All of my favourite things.