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| Yael van der Wouden |
Yael van der Wouden : ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy cured my fear of aliens’
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The Safekeep author on her secret childhood reading, falling in love with Elizabeth Strout and why she keeps coming back to Zadie Smith
Yael van der Wouden
Fri 19 Dec 2025
My earliest reading memory
I had a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed – orange and brown, the cover old flaking plastic – but I retain nothing of what I read. I do remember a book of dirty jokes I was obsessed with at the age of eight. I was convinced it was off limits to me (it wasn’t) and so I waited until my parents were at work to shamefully steal it from the bookshelf. One time, my mother found it under my pillow and I was mortified. I recall her being confused and putting it back with a mumbled “I don’t judge” as she left the room.
My favourite book growing up
That must have been one of Thea Beckman’s novels, most likely Hasse Simonsdochter. Beckman was the author for young adults in 80s and 90s Netherlands.
She wrote these gorgeous, rich novels about teenagers forced into adulthood at a young age. Some people might know Crusade in Jeans – the story of a 15-year-old boy in the 70s who is accidentally transported back in time to the 13th century and ends up leading a children’s crusade ... in jeans. Amazing.
The book that changed me as a teenager
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I grew up in the alien boom of the 90s, when every other week there were UFO sightings and all the adults in my life were talking about The X-Files. It was very scary to me. It was my dad who gave me a copy of Douglas Adams’s book. He’d loved it when he was young. It worked like exposure therapy, if exposure therapy also means making the thing you’re most afraid of (aliens) ridiculous (Zaphod Beeblebrox).
The writer who changed my mind
I was very certain for a good chunk of my youth that when I hit adulthood I’d get a nose job. I’d done the research, I knew how much it would cost, the recovery time, everything. I was 19 when Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Casescame out; a devastating tragicomedy following a couple looking for their disappeared son during Argentina’s “Dirty War” in 1976. There’s a scene in that novel where the desperate parents stand before a soldier with a photograph of their son, and the soldier notes that he looks nothing like them – a different face, a different nose. This hits so intensely because the book opens with a series of events that lead to both parents getting a nose job, a barter-type payment in exchange for a service. I was heartbroken over it for weeks. I had thought the trade-off would be worth it – a stereotyped marker of my heritage in exchange for a more normative beauty standard, a less obvious way of existing – and then I read Englander’s novel and decided it was not.
The book that made me want to be a writer
As a teenager, I typed Jonathan Safran Foer a very earnest letter announcing that I had read Everything Is Illuminated and that now I, too, would be a writer!
The book I came back to
I was 20 and breathing fire, desperately looking for myself in literature, which meant I eviscerated every novel I came across that didn’t reflect myself back at me. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beautyisn’t about young queer Jewish women in the Netherlands. It is, however, gorgeous and layered and full of desire – and it’s subtle. Not fit for someone who is making their way through it with a machete. Notably, though, there were scenes in that novel that stayed with me for years. I returned to it, and to all of Hollinghurst’s work, in my late 20s, and was very happy to find I was wrong. I’m a huge fan, now. I’ve given The Sparsholt Affair to nearly everyone I know. I had the immense pleasure of meeting Alan this year, and was too flustered and confused in the moment to tell him how much I love his work, and what it’s meant to me. He, far more composed, had read mine, and kindly told me he’d enjoyed it. I very nearly died.
The book I reread
I love returning to Zadie Smith’s Changing My Mind. I first read it as an undergrad in comparative literature, as someone whose entire life revolved around the analysis of other people’s novels, and so it was the essays that unpacked others’ writing that shaped my own approach to analysis. When I started publishing my own work, my interest shifted to her essays on writing, the process of creating, editing, returning to one’s work. Every time I dive back into that collection, I find myself drawn to a different essay, and that tells me a lot about the state of mind I am in – whether I feel myself more a reader or a writer.
The book I could never read again
James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room. I read it in one sitting, on a six-hour train ride to Berlin, and was almost beside myself by the time we rolled into the Hauptbahnhof. That kind of devastation can only be felt once.
The book I discovered later in life
When we first started dating, my girlfriend told me that the author who most shaped her as a reader and a writer was Elizabeth Strout. She gave me her copy of My Name Is Lucy Barton. I fell in love twice over: once with the book, and once with her.
The book I am currently reading
The incomparable Zadie Smith’s latest essay collection, Dead and Alive. It’s been my entire personality over the past few weeks.
My comfort read
Austen. Forgive me, I am but one of many.
THE GUARDIAN
