Elena Bowes spoke with Yael van der Wouden about her award-winning debut novel The Safe Keep. A psychological thriller mixed with erotica, revenge and a subtle incisive angle on Hitler’s war, The Safe Keep won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, as well as was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024. Only six books made the shortlist, and this was the first time a Dutch author was chosen. The Safe Keep was named a best book of 2024 by the New York Times, the Washington Post, LA Times Time Magazine, the Economist, the Sunday Times and a host of others. In short, worth a read.
Think Daphne de Maurier’s Rebecca, or Ian McEwan’s Atonement with a twist. The 258-page novel centres on a nearly 30-year-old woman named Isabel, living in a small town in the eastern part of the Netherlands. It’s 1961, sixteen years after the end of WWII. Isabelle is a recluse taking care of the house that she and her two brothers and late mother fled to during the war. She lives a solitary life which is upended when her older brother Louis bring home his graceless girlfriend to stay while he goes on a work project. Isabel’s need for control reaches a crisis. What happens between these two women forces Isabel to reconsider everything she has ever known. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
You can listen to the full interview here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.
Elena: You set your novel in 1961. Why?
Yael: I grew up in a time and space where the war was absolutely and completely over, and yet it kept on creeping up in strange ways. In anecdotes, in conversations, in remnants in the city where Jews lived or at the synagogue where they used to worship. These places have either been reshaped or emptied out. And in the Dutch language there’s remnants of Yiddish of the people who used to speak Yiddish.
I felt like I grew up in a post-war environment, but the ghost of the war was always present, but also it was me. I was the ghost, the person who reminded people. I wanted to place the novel in 1961 because I wanted to explore that.
I think also we have an association with the sixties. We have this idea it’s the era of liberation, excess, creating a new identity that isn’t overshadowed by the war.
And then to then follow a character Isabel who knows no excess and no liberation, and then to slowly pull her apart seemed fascinating to me.
Elena: Did you really write the book in six months?
Yael: I did.
Elena: Amazing.
Yael: This is what I always say to my students. You must remember, before this novel came, there were many others that were not written in six months and never saw the light of day. And it’s not that I woke up one day and thought: I want to be a writer. Let’s see what I can do. And then sat behind the computer and it rolled out of me. Years and years of attempting. I’d never sent anything out because I was never satisfied with anything I’d written so far. When the idea for The Safe Keep came to me, I was writing a different novel, and it felt terrible. I felt like I was cheating on the other novel.
Also, the six month (was preceded by) four months creating the outlines, putting the plot together. A lot of people have asked me about whether I just started writing and saw where it took me.
The thought of that makes me want to sweat. It makes me so nervous. The idea of starting to write without knowing where I’m going to go. I’m an intense planner when it comes to, to writing. Not only did I have outlines upon outlines, I had color-coded flashcards.
Elena: Wow.
Yael: I wanted to create as much scaffolding as possible, including bits of dialogue, bits of movement. I already had certain scenes a little bit written out, so by the time that I started writing, it was basically just colouring in (the story).
When I write, I don’t want to think about the plot so that I can immerse myself in the language that I want, the cadence, the rhythm. I create the plot and the outlining so I can experiment with language.
Elena: So, you’re free?
Yael: I’m free of the plot. Yes,
Elena: You wrote this book in English, not Dutch. Tell us why.
Yael: English is my first language. I grew up speaking English. My mom and my dad both speak each other’s languages very well, but they communicated in English at home. So, I grew up hearing them speaking mostly English and, television and movies were in English. English first Language, Hebrew second, Dutch third.
Elena: Okay.
Yael:. I’ve had the question of whether I could have written it in Dutch. And I think in Dutch it would’ve always sounded as if I was trying to fit Dutch into shoes that weren’t made for it.
Elena: Can you tell us a bit about Isabel’s conflicted relationship with her two brothers, Henrik and Louis.
Yael: Of course. Henrik left the house when he was 16. His mother found out about his affair with a piano teacher, and she gave him an ultimatum: Stay here and never do this again or leave. Of course, he left. He rebuilds his relationship with Isabel eventually, but Isabel will always. associate his love life with abandonment.
Elena: Mm.
Yael: Her brother desired something and that something was more important to him than staying there with her, him keeping her company, being loyal to her.
And, and on the other hand, we have Louis the oldest who has never really understood Isabel, has never given her a lot of attention or time. He too has this habit of putting his love life first. He always has a new girlfriend, and he always brings her no matter what.
He doesn’t quite consider the sensitivity of a situation, the nuance of it. For example, he brings a random girlfriend with him to his mother’s funeral.
Elena: I loved that detail.
Yael: Isabel is annoyed with it because now that girlfriend is in all the pictures, and no one even remembers her name. So, through her brothers, Isabel associates love and sexuality with selfishness and abandonment. And she tries to rebuild the sibling relationship by instituting these monthly or bi-monthly dinners. But each time that they meet up, it seems to reaffirm to her how self-involved her siblings are, and how she’s the only one who truly cares about what matters, the house and their mother’s legacy. Of course, when she then comes to find her own desire, she has to work through a lot of those feelings herself to be able to justify that for herself.
Elena Something I wanted to talk about is the way you build suspense. Your writing of erotica was very suspenseful. You would drop these hints and then just kind of move on. Was it easy for you to write suspense or did you have to go back and edit out things to make it sparer?
Yael: I love writing suspense. I love trying to figure out what creates tension and what breaks tension, especially with a voice like Isabel who’s not allowed to have any self-reflection. If she had the ability to think about her actions, or her desire or interiority in any way, this book could not have existed, right?
Elena: True
Yael: There would’ve been no tension. So, I needed to create a voice for Isabel where she didn’t have access to herself, and we as readers don’t have access to her.
I would write some dialogue and then be like, oh no, she understands too much. I would go back and have to edit a lot of it away or create these half thoughts, these unfinished thoughts.
Elena: As you’re writing the book, are you thinking of it a bit like a film?
Yael: My parents both come from film. Before I knew how to write, my parents had taught me how to make little animations, like in book margins. The pages taught me how to do a storyboard because if I wanted to make an animation, I had to think beforehand. It’s not like a drawing or a painting, you have to think of your character and movement. I’m an avid film lover too.
Elena: On a different track, can you tell us why you like the three-part structure?
Yael: I love a good classic. I studied comparative literature. When you’re a simple-minded youth, you gravitate toward traditional narratives and toward plot.
And then when you mature you come into your intelligence, that’s when you appreciate fragmented storytelling and postmodern storytelling. And to be clear, I love it. I love all of it. I had a period where I started reading postmodern novels and became obsessed. But at the end of the day, it’s still going to be the classic novel that will make me feel big feelings and make me think big thoughts. And the three-act structure is as classic as it gets.
I experience a lot of joy in taking the classic structure and then giving it something that felt not very classic. Maybe it’s something modern in a way to write about culpability, lesbians, erotica.
Elena: What would you like readers to take away from this book?
Yael: I wrote this book for myself. I was thinking a lot about what I wanted from society and what I was unhappy with. And it came from a place of feeling undesired. At the heart of prejudice, marginalization, and looking away from suffering is indifference.
Elena: Mmmm.
Yael: 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. I wanted to take a character from beginning to end and see how she could start with indifference or repulsion even and bring her slowly step by step into desire. I wanted it to end on this idea that there are all these little steps that we might find ourselves (doing) as part of a prejudicial system. It’s these tiny little moments of indifference and thoughtless action that slowly take us over into a place where we are complicit. We are part of a larger evil. And I wanted to chip at that system just a little bit.
So, I think, if readers take away anything, it’ll be that. Find desire where you did not expect desire.
Elena: Well, thank you Yael.