The Interview : Yael van der Wouden

Rachna Singh, Editor, The Wise Owl talks to Yael van der Wouden, a writer and teacher. She currently lectures in creative writing and comparative literature in Netherlands. Her essay on Dutch identity and Jewishness, ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’, received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018. Her writing has appeared in LitHub, Electric Literature, The Offing and Elle.com, amongst others. The Safekeep, her debut novel, has been long listed for the Booker Prize 2024.

Thank you so much Yael, for taking time out to talk with The Wise Owl.

RS: Your debut novel, The Safekeep is set in 1961 Netherlands and explores the fall out of World War II. For the benefit of the readers please tell us what made you write this book and briefly tell us the central themes and narratives you explore in the novel.

YW: I come from both a European Jewish heritage and a non-Jewish, Dutch heritage. I have grandparents who fled the war and grandparents who had to live through the German occupancy. The question of choices made in war, and how people dealt with those choices after all was said and done is one I came to think about more and more, the more I understood my own position in history—about how complicity isn’t always clear-cut. I’ve been wanting to write something about that for a long time, an essay I thought, or a longread article . . . The idea for the novel came to me almost as a surprise! But once it did, and once I saw the scope of it play out in my mind, the writing became almost compulsive. It’s a novel about homes, about desire, about who benefits from apologies, who they are for. The novel ends with the notion of gift-giving, which is on purpose! I hoped to make people question apologies and forgiveness, and whether it’s something a person can gift another . . .

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RS: How did you navigate the challenge of balancing personal and historical narratives in your novel, especially given the complex themes of identity and heritage?

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YW: I weaved my heritage in it—as I’d mentioned, both ends of it—but at the same time I’ve kept it very easy for myself by setting the novel inside a single house, and within a single perspective. History occasionally wafts through in a comment, girls at school make, or her aunt recounting a memory of the war, but Isabel—our main character—can close the door against it and return to what she likes to do best: count items around the house and clean the good china. Her restraint made me restrained in what I allowed to enter the story, too. I collected thoughts and anecdotes and academic research, and then unleashed that in one long chapter that acts as the antithesis to Isabel’s discipline: the diary chapter.

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​RS: Your writing has been described as deeply reflective and thought-provoking. Can you share some insights into your creative process? Do you have any rituals or routines that help you get into the writing flow?

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YW: That’s very kind, thank you! I joke sometimes that in another life I would’ve been a director, because the way I write stories is that I let them unspool like movies first. I have to see it, I have to run the whole story through my head—the lighting, the scene blocking, the patterns on the wallpaper, the shadows, the tone of voice, everything—before I can put anything to paper. So much of my writing happens when I do other things, the dishes or the wash or going for a walk. That’s the routine part of it: getting distracted by life, and in that distraction, allowing the movie to unfold in my mind. So by the time I get to writing, it’s as if I’m translating a scene I’ve watched in a movie theatre onto page.

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RS: Given your background in literature, how do you approach the challenge of originality in your work? Do you consciously try to innovate, or do you find that originality naturally emerges as you write?

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YW: This is such a good question, because it’s a conversation I have very often with my students who are worried that they are not original enough to write yet. The way I see it, the only way to come into writing is first by imitation. We don’t mind it in any other form of art: when you learn to illustrate, you start by mimicking still-life around you. You learn to imitate styles so that you can find your own within it. When playing the piano, you have to first play works of others before knowing how to compose your own. It’s no different in literature. Cliché is not the enemy, it’s a tool, a mechanism. And I truly believe that in order to have writing that engages with the reader on an emotional level, that is in conversation with an audience rather than treating them as just a set of eyes that happens to be there, you need writing that leans on existing structures. A three-act structure works because most narrative products in our society are three-act—be it in music or in film, the intro/problem/denouement triptych is how we experience stories. So in using that, we’re creating a sense of comfort for a reader, a feeling that they are safe within the confines of the story, that they more or less know what’s going to happen. The trick is to use that structure to do something new and unexpected. If the form is known, then the content can break convention in a way that provokes emotion.

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RS: How do you balance your roles as a writer and a lecturer? Do they complement each other, or do you find it challenging to switch between the two?

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YW: Oh no, it’s absolutely necessary to have the two, for me. I took a break from lecturing to be able to focus on the book, and immediately began missing it. When you’re working on your novel, you’re very focussed on things that have to do with you—your voice, your story, your future, is it any good, will you be able to recreate it ever again, etc. When you’re lecturing, you’re not that important anymore. The students are interested in what you have to say, sure, but they’re not there to interview you about your life, or ask personal questions; you’re a bit of a blank page, and that can be a great feeling when the rest of your time is so insular.

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RS: What advice would you give to aspiring writers who are working on their first novels, especially those tackling complex themes like identity and heritage?

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YW: One of the most valuable experiences in finishing The Safekeep was the editorial process. I sent it to people who knew me very well, and who knew what the plot was about. Then I sent it to people who knew what the plot was and had a very different cultural background to me. Then I sent it to people who didn’t know me at all, whose first languages were different from mine, and who didn’t know what the book was about. Those conversations were priceless. You find out what happens to a story if you strip away the weight you yourself put on certain elements: the history, the identity part. Does it still work as a love story? Does it still work as a mystery? In what ways? What did you understand immediately, even though you didn’t grow up in a Dutch household—and what seemed foreign to you? The answers to those questions shaped the novel as it is today. My advice would be: find four kinds of first readers. Those who are like you, those who are unlike you, those who know the story beforehand, those who know nothing of it at all. Ask them what works. I cannot recommend this enough!

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RS: With The Safekeep being your debut novel, what are your aspirations for your future work? Are there any specific stories or themes you're eager to explore next?

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YW: After I finished it, I said, no more historical novels. It was never my intention to write historical novels! My short stories and my first attempts at novels are usually set in the 90s, early 00s. But when the idea for The Safekeep came to me, I decided to make what I thought would be a one-time exception—turned out that’s nonsense, because here I am again, writing yet another historical novel, set even further back in time, the 1920s. There’s still a lot of overlapping themes with The Safekeep: belonging, desire, women who are angry and who seek revenge. There’s also a lot of new themes in the new one that didn’t get a lot of airtime in The Safekeep—notions of beauty and ugliness and what it means for what we think we deserve in life. I’m especially eager to explore control in this new novel. A character who goes, ‘Ok, now I’m going to take CONTROL and claim what I want for myself!’--and then finds out that there’s a limit to how far she can take it, if taking control means also controlling other people’s lives . . .

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RS: As someone who has written extensively for various platforms, how do you see the role of essays in your broader writing career? Do you plan to continue writing in this genre alongside fiction?

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YW: Essays are so important to me! It’s where I work out my feelings about certain themes—things that repeat in my life. My essays start out with lists, usually. My first published essay, on my experience growing up Jewish in a Dutch Protestant town, started as a list named: times people have shouted ‘Hey Anne Frank!’ at me. I have another essay on financial insecurity that started a list titled, ‘times I visited super rich people’s homes’. Not all the lists become essays, and not all the essays get published, but they’re still a great emotional touchstone for me. It’s through those essays that I ended up writing The Safekeep, trying to hash out my feelings about Dutch histories, and what I think is lacking in conversations about complicity. It’s very likely I’ll keep on writing essays for as long as I write in general!

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RS: You have an extensive background in teaching creative writing and comparative literature. How has your academic experience shaped your approach to writing fiction?

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YW: Without question it’s made me a better writer. Reading other people’s work makes you better. Editing other people’s work, learning how to talk about what works in a text and what doesn’t, having to put into words why you like this and don’t like this—why you’d like to see more of this and less of this—forces you to crystallize your taste in writing. I know what I want from my own scene because I know what I’d want from someone else’s scene.

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RS: Finally, what does literary success mean to you? Has being longlisted for the Booker Prize changed your perspective on success in any way?

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YW: This is such an important question and I so, so wish I had an eloquent answer to it! But the truth is, so much of what happens in around the publication of your book feels like floating between the sea and shore and sometimes you’re being banged against the rocks and sometimes you’re carried out onto the sunny beach and sometimes a tide pulls you under and you have no control over any of it. What I think I didn’t understand beforehand is to what degree all of this would feel like learning a whole new language, or starting a brand new job where you can’t apply any of your previous skills—everything feels brand new, and so often a you can’t separate the good from the bad, or worse still, a good thing can be so overwhelming it can almost feel like a bad thing.

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At some point, when I was having a bit of a meltdown in the weeks after publication, I had one of my lovely agents on the phone and she said: ‘Every bit of good news will be fleeting, you’re on this list the one day you’re off it the next, and then you’re back to craving the next bit of good news—right back where you started. So you can choose, do you want to always be in good-news limbo, or accept that it’ll come sometimes—as well the bad news—and that both are fleeting and a little irrelevant as long as you enjoy the practice of writing.’ That helped.

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I also got to chat to a lot of booksellers in the last few months who have changed my perspective on things. You can have a book that isn’t considered a national success, but is the favourite of one bookseller, and so within that bookshop that book will be the most sold book—there will be so much passion and dedication going into trying to get other people to read that novel. And for what? For the simple joy of getting to share a story that you’ve loved. Of then getting to ask, ‘Oh, what did you think of the ending??’. And what an awful thought, to look at that and consider that a failure. I’m baffled and bowled over by the Booker shortlisting, but I’m also trying to take it in stride. I’m on it today, and next week it’ll be someone else’s moment in the sun. And perhaps my next one will be a flop, who knows. I’m trying to see it all as part of the same ecosystem. Trying being the operative word here. I’ll let you know if I succeed.

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Thank you so much Yael for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with us about your creativity and your debut novel. We wish you the very best in all your creative endeavours and literary pursuits. We are rooting for you and hoping that you are the Booker Prize winner of 2024.