What It Means to Return: A Guest Post by Yael van der Wouden

An exhilarating debut inspired by Yael van der Wouden’s family house, The Safekeep combines a captivating story of obsession with the morbid backdrop of a war-torn country. In her exclusive essay below, van der Wouden reveals the inspiration behind her first novel and its dynamic characters.

My parents sometimes joke that the book was my grandparents’ parting gift to me.  

I got the idea for The Safekeep the day of my Dutch grandfather’s funeral, and right before my Jewish grandmother’s funeral: they passed within a few days of one another.  

I was in the car when it happened, on the way to the funeral home looking out over the flat fields and the cows and a scene materialized—a house, a woman living in that house, a stranger arriving. And then things start to disappear.  

A backdrop formed: post-war Netherlands, family secrets, queer desire.  

A whodunnit if the ‘who’ was as unclear as the ‘it’. Erotica where the erotics are also horror.  

I was working on a different novel at the time, and I was grieving, and also it was the pandemic—I had other things to keep me busy. But I let it simmer, and made a deal with myself: if I’m still thinking about this in four months, then I’ll write the first chapter.  

In four months I had a plot outline and the blueprint to a house. It was September when I sat down and wrote the first line, ‘Isabel found a broken piece of ceramic under the roots of a dead gourd’, and in February I had finished a first draft. I wrote most of it on the train to work, a two-hour morning commute through the Dutch flatlands. Frost and mist and an endless horizon to my left, and on my screen—Isabel, sour as sour can be.  

It was hard to stop writing her once I started. There was something deeply attractive and thrilling about writing someone who allowed herself to be blunt and unkind and rude and did not regret a single one of her actions. It was like running a test where you ask: were I to be the worst version of myself, what’s the worst that can happen? Will at least one person still like me, or love me, or fall in love with me?  

Which is where Eva comes in. She is Isabel’s antithesis, the brother’s new girlfriend—loud and loose and a little bit off. E.M. Forster’s Maurice was a great inspiration here, to take a character who thinks they know who they are, and then throw something—someone—into their lives that ‘muddles’ them, that upends their self perception. There are two mysteries for Isabel to solve: the mystery of her family’s past, and the mystery of herself. 

In the early days of writing I kept telling my friends that this was my goodbye letter to the Netherlands. That I’d write this book and move away, that it was me working through my Big Feelings once and for all: the Dutch and the things they never talk about, the secrets that seem to bleed through every family history. I’ll write it, I thought, and be done with it for good. This may have been a tad dramatic—I am still in the Netherlands, with no current plans to move anywhere—but I was right about this: writing The Safekeep was cathartic. 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.