The Safekeep
The Safekeep
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Yael van der Wouden on The Safekeep
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A ghost haunting its old homeThe novel’s premise arrived between two funerals. Van der Wouden had just lost her Dutch grandfather and her Jewish grandmother within days of each other, and she was traveling by car across the flat Dutch countryside when the core situation came to her fully formed.
Between two funerals, looking out over flat Dutch fields, van der Wouden described the idea as arriving all at once: a woman in a house, another woman coming to take back what was hers, and the two of them falling in love. She said of that moment that the idea “appeared out of nowhere” and that “descended” was the only word she could find for it. [paraphrased from audio]
The seed the funerals cracked open had been forming for years. Growing up in the Netherlands as one of a handful of Jewish children in a small Protestant town, she had accumulated a frustration she found herself voicing, again and again, at social gatherings.
“I have this rant that I often trot out at parties, about living as a Jewish person in the Netherlands and how it feels like being a ghost haunting its old home, how the skeleton of what used to be is still there—the homes of Jewish people, certain Jewish customs that infiltrated into Dutch culture—but the people themselves are gone.”
What the book finally became was a surprise to her. She had told friends early on that writing it would be her farewell to the Netherlands. The act of writing reversed that intention.
“I thought it was a story about what it takes to leave a place behind; I found that it was a story about what it means to return.”
The novel’s historical question, what the Dutch silence after the war costs those still living inside it, was one she could not approach from a single vantage point. Her father’s family lived under German occupation; her mother’s family fled as refugees. That double inheritance shaped the book’s central preoccupation.
“The question of choices made in war, of theft and of land and how people dealt with those choices after all was said and done, is a question that sits at the core of who I am, my position in history.”
How she wrote it
Color-coded flashcards and a five-hour train to BerlinFour months of plotting preceded a single sentence of prose. Van der Wouden wanted to arrive at drafting with every structural decision already settled, so the writing itself could be spent entirely on language.
“I’m an intense planner when it comes to writing. Not only did I have outlines upon outlines, I had color-coded flashcards.”
She describes the actual drafting as “basically just colouring in” a story that already existed in blueprint form, and those six months of writing happened almost entirely on two-hour commuter trains to Maastricht, where she mumbled text aloud to check rhythm.
Isabel, the novel’s protagonist, is a woman with no real access to her own interior life. Every line of dialogue and inner monologue had to be stripped of any self-knowledge Isabel would not actually possess, which meant repeated passes of deletion. The constraint turned out to carry an argument beyond character.
“I wanted the unfinished nature of thoughts and dialogue to mimic also what it feels like to exist in an environment where history also serves as an unfinished thought.”
The diary chapter, which delivers the full perspective of Eva (the woman who arrives to reclaim stolen objects) in one burst after eleven chapters inside Isabel’s restricted voice, was not in the original plan. Van der Wouden had set the problem of the reveal aside when earlier ideas bored her immediately. The solution, which she had doubted for exactly one second, was written almost entirely on a single train journey.
“I remember thinking ‘is that too cliché?’ for one second, and then following that thought with: ‘if it works, who cares?’”
Making Isabel’s queerness part of the novel’s architecture, rather than its decoration, required a structural argument. Van der Wouden had to work out what the same-sex love story accomplished that a different configuration could not.
“I think the queer love story accomplishes something else, which is it changes all of the power dynamics. It means that Isabel is also vulnerable in this way, that made me much more sympathetic to her.”
Period detail for the novel’s 1961 Dutch setting came largely through her father, whom she interviewed about what a woman of Isabel’s rural, middle-class circumstances would have owned. One absence in the finished book traces directly to that conversation: she could not confirm whether a refrigerator would have been plausible, so she cut refrigerators entirely.
“A good sex scene has so little to do with the movements and positions and so much more to do with how you got there, what the characters want from each other and what the stakes are.”
What she wants us to sit with
Desire as the next step after indifferenceVan der Wouden uses the word “desire” to name what she believes comes after apology and tolerance, neither of which she considers sufficient as a response to historical wrong. The love story between Isabel and Eva, the Dutch woman and the woman reclaiming stolen property, is meant to make that argument felt rather than stated.
“At the heart of prejudice, marginalization, and looking away from suffering is indifference. And the opposite of indifference isn’t tolerance or isn’t charity, it’s desire, saying, I was indifferent to you, I was repulsed by you even, and now I desire you.”
The novel’s hopeful ending was a deliberate choice, and van der Wouden has been clear-eyed about why it costs more to earn than a tragic one. Some readers want something closer to justice for those who erased and forgot; her answer is that the book is asking a different question.
“I think it’s so, so much more impressive when a hopeful ending is made to feel true, like a real possibility. It’s harder than making a sad ending feel true and possible—that’s life.”
The book she wrote is not about whether justice arrives. It is about whether desire can outlast indifference, and she leaves that question open enough that readers feel its weight rather than its resolution.
From the earliest version of the project, van der Wouden wanted the answer the book offered to be something more demanding than co-existence. The love story is the form that answer takes.
“I wanted to write a story where the answer to past prejudices wasn’t an apology and mild tolerance, but desire—so much desire that the only path forward is together, entangled.”