YouSaid · the spoken record

Yael van der Wouden

lines on the record: 46
first: 2025-07-23
most recent: 2025-07-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“To say a collective and really well-meant thank you and then retreat into my, go to some museums, watch some movies, hang out with my friends, and then Feel like I'm a little bit invisible again and then go back to the novel. Just to give you a little hint of what the novel is, the new one, I'm still somehow in history. I don't know how that happened. 1929, we follow this woman who lives on a fictional island and she wants out of her divorce and finds out quite quickly that the only way to easily get a divorce in that time is to through proving adultery in a court of law. And so She gets the help of her husband's childhood sweetheart to frame him for adultery so that the childish sweetheart will then seduce the husband and they plant together, sort of run away with the money. And then, of course, chaos happens.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I finished a draft before everything starts. So I have something waiting for me to return to. As wonderful and amazing as all of this is, I found that interestingly, praise is not a very conductive space for creativity. Not to say that rejection is, you know, both extremes are not super fruitful ground, but I think there's something about being slightly invisible and quiet that maybe just a tiny little Sprinkling of both hope and somebody telling you that you can't do it and you're like, yes, I can. That's the most fertile ground. And so I need to find that again. I'm not inviting people to send me in. Let me be clear. But I think I need to”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The next book, which the good news is that I finished a first draft before this rigamorole, this whole thing started. I mean, not started. I finished a draft in April from May until now. It's been upside down world chaos and joy and all of that.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And at the same time, nothing in my life has prepared me for this. And I was talking about giving, I don't want to give Isabel therapy for her moral quandaries. And I also don't know how to give myself therapy for these champagne problems, which is like, okay, how do you deal with?”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I have no idea what's going on, really. I do not recognize my life. Well, I do have the same life to a degree, right? I still go and buy tomatoes. The grass the other day, and I was like, Yes, I'm mowing the grass. It's still the smallness of it and the things I get frustrated by and the fact that I'm, you know, I just got my driver's license last year and I'm still quite a bad driver, right? And I still, the small things that are human and are still the same. And then the big things are just completely, I have no idea how to process them. I got to go to Australia. I never thought I would. I got to go to New Zealand. I never thought I would. You know, and I got to meet my heroes, just my actual life heroes. I got to meet Miranda July. I got to meet Torre Peters, people that I've loved on the page. And now suddenly I got, yeah, I spoke words out loud of them. It's bizarre.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“What small little things need to happen in my life that would, without my noticing maybe, make me complicit or make me a perpetrator. Because usually perpetratorship doesn't come from Voldemort Hitler type of thing. It comes from very small acts of dismissal and rejection. And indifference and rejection and indifference and dismissal I think that we all do. And it's sort of like recognizing that that small movement towards indifference and knowing what to do with it. I really wanted to sort of sit down with myself, okay, what tools can I give Isabel other than therapy which I can't give her? To deal with her own complicity. So that perspective was really important to me in writing Isabel, yes.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Interesting, right? You go from, I mean, theoretically, if I've done my job correctly, you go from disliking her to a degree and not understanding what drives her to sort of finding empathy. And the moment that you find empathy, hopefully part three sort of appends that again. And in that part three, we have to sort of reclaim some of the, not just the empathy, but this sort of this god-trenching feeling of like, oh my God, something has happened and I did not know about it and now I know about it. Oh, what do I do? And what can you do? And I think if we only have narratives that focus on either perpetratorship as this sort of like this flat evil, you know, Hitler Voldemort type of thing. And on the other hand, we have victimhood and we can always project our own insecurities, our own suffering onto victimhood, then we are never forced to think, what needs to happen in my life.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That we are sort of uniquely outside of the system by being virtuous and good, but rather sort of, okay, how do we then deal with finding out that we have inadvertently been complicit in one way or another?”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was interest about it. Also, I kind of needed it. It's the perspective that I have not seen very much and have not seen very much explored in a way that was productive. Isabel is a character. As we follow her more and more, we find out in what ways she was witness to certain things or complicit in certain things or complicit in a way that is very remote from perpetratorship. She hasn't enacted anything. She was a child during the war. But still, she's part of a system. And the thing is, we are all part of a system. We're all part of a racist sexist, homophobic, transphobic system. And we're all witness and we're all complicit within that system. And the question is not sort of like, how can we purify ourselves? How can we show that we are completely...”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, they got married. They still got married. They're both very sober people. At the end of the day, still very Dutch. They just like, you know, what you gonna do. Tis what is. And yeah, so it is love and complicity and history are intrinsically part of growing up in this country and growing up in this society. I think at some point it's always going to come up in one way or another. So there's that. And also there's the part where writing through Isabel was something that I”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of course. I mean, the obvious and boring answer is that I am... A queer woman. And so I wrote what was interesting to me. Is that just interesting to me because I'm a queer woman, but also because my queerness has, the way I desire has been defined through living in a post-war country, by which I mean, you know, if you date someone in this country, if you want to go on a day, if you want to have a crush on somebody. I mean, no one ever wants to have a crush. It happens. But if any of that is sort of part of your experience, at some point you're going to have a conversation with somebody if the person that you're dating, if they're family or grandparents were around during the war, you're going to have to have the conversation of, you know, okay. What did your grandparents do? What did my grandparents do? And sort of how do we feel about that, like the story that I told about my two friends who found that?”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The emotionality with which the book is written. It's very funny because the Dutch seem to, like, I think the word excess has been used very much in response to my book in the Netherlands. And it's funny because I've heard the English response has tended to be like, it's such a restrained book. And I think it's so funny because I think the English do tend to have a vision of view of themselves as like restrained and repressed people. And then I'm just like, well. Should meet the Dutch then, I suppose, because you know, if you think this is repressed and the Dutch think that is excessive. Excessive, and you know, what's the truth? I don't know.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the newspaper, they're the ones who've come up with the, we already know this story. This is nothing. Reaction Some people have wondered whether it's I've okay so I don't read the reviews So take this with a grain of salt. When I say I've heard, I mean, my friends occasionally sort of let me know, oh, just so you know, somebody said this. I think there's a few question marks about.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She did it. It's story's been told. Then that's that, if that's knowing, then we say knowing, then we basically say the story has only just a very, very small. Allowed only a very small space in the cultural consciousness. But also I don't think that's knowing, right? There's knowing individually and then there's collective knowing. And I think that if we all know privately but don't have a conversation about it, that's not collective knowing. That's still individual knowing. And it's an interesting question. I understand that people would react to that like that. I understand where it comes from, but I do think it begs a deeper question of what knowledge then is.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes. And that's it. That's the whole story. It's three pages. And if we take a short story that is three pages and say, we all know this story because it's one short story, then we deem our dad.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Or a tea set, a tea set that her mother had stored with the neighbors. And at first she sent away and she said, she's told, we don't have your things, please go away. There's nothing for us to give to you to sleep. And so she leaves and then she comes back at a later date just to see if there's anything she can do to dissuade them. And then the daughter opens the door and the daughter has no idea who she is and invites her in and says, like, my mother will be home any minute. Can I offer you some tea? And then she gives her tea and the tea is served.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One on one have been wonderful Is that this is not a new story, and we all know this. And then that begs the question, okay. Than what is knowing, right? What is knowing? If we all know this because we all have a story like this and we all heard our grandmother talk about this or we've all heard it from somebody else and it's something that is talked about at the dinner table. Is that knowing? Because I haven't been able to find any novels that deal with this in the Dutch context. And there's only one short story written by the absolutely sort of brilliant and for me kind of like the originator of this genre of reflecting on post-war Jewish life in the Netherlands, Marjamenko. But she wrote a short story about a woman who goes back to the old neighbors that her mother used to have after the war to ask back for a set of silver spoons”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But what I mean by that is that I do mean like there is an accusatary note, but it's also me directed at myself because I'm also. Dutch, my father is Dutch, and that part of the town is not Jewish. I do have my Jewish side of my family, but that side of the family hails from Romania, Bulgaria, Ukraine. It's a different history. So my Dutch history is an amalgamation of two things, but not uniquely sort of Dutch Jewish in that long heritage kind of way. But the reception in the Netherlands has been twofold. There's the readers, right? The people read it and the people who write to me or talk to me. And that generally is always just such a fascinating conversation, especially within the Dutch Jewish community. Listen, my Dutch Jewish community is like queer and activist. So, you know, they're not gonna have any complaints, I don't think they do, at least they didn't tell me. So, and I appreciate that. But generally, the conversations that I've had with people.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I include myself in that accusatory note. I don't think it, to me, it was an accusatory. It was just, I was just having a conversation with myself when I was writing it. Also, there was no one. I was as close to being a nobody as possible. It was a topic that I cared a lot about. But also, you know,”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, a lot of what has been written about is the very, just very much about the people who survive the war within the Netherlands and then their lives in the post-war era, especially fiction. That's the focus. And so I had to lean on just a few but very good and very extensive works. And the primary researcher for that is the scholar called Michal Situn, who wrote this fantastic work called Uvortanimotsvacht, means no one is expecting you. And that, together with many stories that I've collected from family friends and my own, you know, I just interviewed my own father a lot. He was around in the early 60s. So that was what the research looked like. Also ended up reading sort of random essays on. Like the physicality of domestic spaces in the 1960s, because I need to figure out do we have a fridge? Do we have a washing machine?”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These parades, and there would be, you know, many things. I mean, every country has definitely stories of this bureaucratic dismissal and violence. But in the Netherlands, it was, I believe, to a degree uniquely. Unique accrual. And so a lot of people just didn't stay, and that's also part of the reason why the Jewish community here is so small. And that research came from primarily from the thing was that there hasn't been that much written about this, about this part of post-war Netherlands.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Anything there because if you did earn, you have to pay taxes. And on top of that, here's a bill for your own rescue from the camps. So many, many, many, many Dutch Jews just didn't stay in the Netherlands. They couldn't afford to. But also in an emotional way, there was no homecoming. I think, I mean, it's more complicated. I don't want to just compare it to France and be like France did everything perfectly. Absolutely not. But if you do compare it to other countries, what you do see is that many countries had a sense of we are welcoming back our own in a certain way or like if not our own then the return of these people at least represents survival and it represents winning so there will be”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so the bill would then go to the Dutch government. The Dutch government would keep very close track of who this healthcare was given to and who this hub was given to. And when those people eventually made their way back home through the help of a different Red Cross, that bill would be then redirected to the individual people. So they had they just returned from the camps. Imagine you return from the camps. You don't have a house because your house has been confiscated. You have a paid rent. You haven't paid your mortgage. You have redirected into these, usually it was either schools or municipal buildings or orphanages that would then repurpose to house people return from the camps. It's absolutely disease ridden because everybody has diseases that they brought with from the camps. You then start, while you're there, you start getting notifications, like you have to pay taxes, you haven't paid taxes. You need to prove that you have an earned.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One there, and your parents aren't there. And so some Dutch Jewish people who are in these camps ended up hitching rides with other Red Crosses. And some of these Red Crosses would either give, I mean, obviously not just transport them, they would feed them to a degree. try to patch them up in whatever way they would give them healthcare and then that's still an expense that's still you know just a very”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had to figure out okay, how do we bring them back here? That's something that each country had to decide for itself. And most countries had a plan ready. The Netherlands definitely had a plan ready. What happened was that they couldn't agree on the finances of it, sort of how it would be financed, sort of bureaucratic legislative element of that. And so because they couldn't decide, they just ended up doing nothing. So what happened when the war ended was that there were no Red Cross, no Dutch Red Cross vehicles that went to all these camps to pick up the people who had to somehow get back home. And so it's kind of like, you know, I can only sort of imagine it as that moment where, you know, maybe this is a terrible way to compare it, but like at the end of the school day and all the children are getting picked up and you're just like the”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's even more boring than that, and more it's both more boring and more horrifying. For example, people who return from the camps after the war would have to fill out several forms to prove that they hadn't earned anything in the camps because if they'd earned any money in the camps, they would have to pay taxes on that earning. So there was this people who returned right and also the returning itself was a whole bureaucratic element because most countries leading up to the end of the war had to figure out they knew that they had citizens, Jewish citizens in these camps.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About to talk about it. And then her boyfriend, her fiance, found out that his grandfather was a collaborator. He was part of the NSB, which is the part of, it's a Dutch party that collaborated with the Germans, with the Nazis. And then you find this out at the same time. And what are you going to do, right? You're engaged. You love each other. What does that do to your relationship? And so these are just two stories. And I have, you know, I have so many of them, so many friends who either grew up Jewish and have a story about Their family doing the war, either returning or hiding. The boring bureaucracy of war, because a lot of war is bureaucratic in a way.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But they both found out something in that process which was around that same time, which is she found out that her grandmother was Jewish. And had gone into hiding as a young child with a Catholic family and that Catholic family adopted her in the end. And so she grew up Catholic and had never, she wanted to, she entirely rejected her Jewish background and didn't want to, you know.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I either he was telling this story at infinitum to every single person, Jewish or not. And then he just saw a chance to do it again. Or it was something, or he was looking for some kind of redemption. I have a friend who she was engaged to her boyfriend at the time. And then in that process, both of them realized two things at once. Every time I tell this story, I worry that it's not exactly how the story went because I have a tendency to sort of lean toward the path of least resistance when it comes to narratives. And then I sort of, you know, smooth out the details without realizing this.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All the same, he asked me, Are you Jewish? And I said yes. And then he starts telling me about when he was eight that he lived in the building opposite the bridge. And he pointed at this building. And he said, it was night and it was winter and it was snowing. And I heard noises outside and I looked out the window. And I saw German soldiers collecting all the Jewish people from I'm sure it wasn't all the Jewish people from the city because it went in gradation, but this is how we told he saw the German soldiers collecting Jewish people on the other end of the bridge and sort of herding them into trucks. And he said, you know, I was eight. I didn't know what was happening. I didn't know what to do. I was just watching it happen. And I was like, I'm 13, sir. I don't know what to tell you.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I did. And he asked me, are you Jewish? And this is when I was 13, unfortunately, I don't know if unfortunately, but it is what it is. It resembled the most well-known face of a Jewish young girl, which was Al Frank. And so this would happen quite a lot. I would just, people would just be like, oh my God, are you Jewish? Because you look just like Al Frank. I did not look just, I just looked, I vaguely looked like a young Jewish girl, or at least the most famous one.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yes. When I was thirteen, I was biking home from school. I had to cross a bridge in the city. And this man stopped me, this random stranger stopped me on the other side of the bridge. And he was like, could you stop for a second? And this was like 2001. I think the panic around. I mean, surely we had the stranger danger already, but it somehow hadn't sort of fully settled into my system that I thought, well, maybe I shouldn't stop for this brand.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The research was tricky. The research I mean, I knew a lot of this history through orally friends and my own family, my friends, family of friends. I think everybody in my community had a version of a story like this. And I also ended up being, I keep on calling it the rabbi. I think in many situations I was often Growing up in the Netherlands, I was often the only Jewish person in whatever given space I was in, unless I was, you know, at a Jewish gathering, but other than that, there's just the Jewish community is just absolutely tiny. And so I ended up being the person that a lot of people went to in order to quote unquote confess either secret histories or things that they knew about their family but had no one to talk to about.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Zombie in a way, so the editorial process very much sort of seeing those threads and sort of pulling at them and seeing, okay, what's, you know, how much can I put in the first paragraph even to indicate the themes of the book?”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Performing national identity. You participate in taxes, you participate in earning enough money, you are the model citizen, you buy a house, you pay off your mortgage, yada yada and the garden and the inside and the curtains. Everything's in order. And then what happens in the very first paragraph is you cannot keep death from coming at your door, right? The gourd is rotten. you cannot keep history from you know coming coming”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She has to immediately go and keep it in, you know, tear out all the rotten bits and make sure that the patch of garden is maintained. And in doing that, she finds a piece of history. Of course, I mean, these are things that I did sit down. And before I wrote the book, I was like, I'm going to put into mysticity and a rotten gourd. But as I was writing it, it was all the things that I've been passionate about all the thoughts that I've been thinking that sort of automatically came sort of we started to weave themselves into the narrative. And once I finished the first draft, the trick was to go back and sort of see what was in there and to pull on these things intentionally. And one of the strings that I was pulling at was the idea of the domestic as this space that needs to be controlled and home ownership indeed is sort of like this, again, another extension of the.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Also, in Amsterdam, sometimes I mean, it's a little hard because Amsterdam houses a very narrow and very high up, but the Netherlands tends to have huge windows, no curtains. And then at night, of course, everybody turns out their lights, and then you can just look straight into everybody's living rooms. And I see this as a very sort of Calvinist expression of, look at me, I'm exactly the same as everyone else. There's not too much, you know, crystals or gold. Bare minimum mouse, but it's kept perfectly clean. There's no show of excess. And with, you know, with Isabel on her relationship to the house is very much, she does, you know, she does participate in this Calvinist ritual of I must keep my house exactly as everybody else and I must keep my garden. It starts with the gourd that's, you know, rotting because of the turn of spearing came on too soon.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have to sort of do the same rituals. And that ritual can be the upkeep of the law. This is a very long-winded way of saying that what has fascinated me about the domestic and about the garden is this idea of the outside and the inside and the way that the outside of the house has to Acts as a marker for our community of like we are safe, we are not gonna be unlike anyone else. We are all going to be the same in the same way. We are not going to pose any danger. And in the Netherlands, you have like these huge windows. I don't know if you've ever been to the Netherlands.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Status and also momentum Mori, this idea of like you would in these gardens you would also disappear into these mazes and at the end of the maze like you through this maze you would walk through all phases of life. There would be statues to remind you of like birth and love and then old age and the end death but it's these gardens oftentimes end up being a place where we play out our fear of death, right? We have to keep everything green. We have to keep everything alive, right? We're not allowed to let our lawn go yellow in the summer. We have to keep it to water it and water it even though water prices are through the roof. And this idea of like having to control the extension of who we are and who we are in the national sort of sense, this idea of like, in order to belong in order to enact our national identity, we need to conform to our neighbors as well.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Never allowed to grow to maturity, and it always has to sort of stay uniform. It's this idea of like, we must not let nature get out of hand. And especially the square shape of the suburban lawn is lent. It's borrowed from this Renaissance Venetian garden where it was very much a symbol of”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like it sounds incredibly niche, but what it means is that I looked at the ways that the relationship that we have with creating landscapes, creating stories in landscapes, how that sort of makes us tell stories of belonging and with the domestic, when you look at the domestic, and especially if you look at the domestic garden, what you see instead of this history of like how we like to work out fantasies of control in the garden, right? Look at all this land that I have that I don't have to use for food or cultivation, right? It's just grass and it's just pretty trees and I'm not using it to feed myself, right? It's a play of wealth. I don't mean, you know, to use my land for wealth. I can just use it for pretty things. And then there's the grass, which we constantly mow, right? We keep it at an infate state.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Course, no, the fancy of home ownership. I mean, there's two things I want to say to that. On the one hand, I think it's like the fascinating legacy of the domesticity, right? The domestic as the place where the national self is created. And by what I mean by that is, and now I'm fully, this is fully.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think Daily Smith has written a beautiful essay about this. I think she's written several essays talking about Forrester, but the one that comes to mind is the one about love. I think it was a 2002 essay, and yet I keep on going back to it. And also in her collection, a collection of essays, she's written, I think an entire essay about Forrester, where she talks about the muddling, the way that the enforcer's relationship to muddling characters, taking a character from clarity and then throwing something into that character's life that completely appends their relationship to reality, to themselves. And that's deeply satisfying to me.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I just have always been fascinated by a character who believes so fiercely that they are in control or believe so fiercely that they know themselves and then finds out, and we find out along with them that in fact there is no such thing as control. And there is really no such thing as knowing yourself in the way that you want to know yourself. And very much, I'm a big enforcer fan, and you enforcer does this does this thing with most of his characters, but specifically he does this with Maurice, but he also does this very beautifully with Howard's End and a room with a view, takes these characters who feel very sort of certain of what they want and what their view of the future is. And then he shakes them up like a snow globe and sees what happens.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then with every single layer that you take off of this narrative, you find out that, in fact, she's not at all in charge, not of her own future, right? If her brother decides that he wants to marry and he wants to come and live back in the house, she will basically have to scram. Where will she go? It's unclear. There's, I think, this idea that the uncle will take care of her, maybe get her like an apartment somewhere. But the ideal that everybody in the family wants is for her to, of course, marry herself and then move in with whatever future husband she will then get. But she keeps that future very much at bay. She does not want to look at it, does not want to think of it. And then we found out that also other elements that she does not control aside from this house, which is also her desire or, like I said, her relationship to her own traumatic history.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It seemed to me like yet again, just like the whole novel is just me having a conversation with myself and asking Richard what would be interesting. But to have a character who was so entirely certain of herself and seemed to be so in control. And for every so when you enter into the novel, she is fully in control of the Garden of the House, of a relationship with her siblings, right? She's the one in charge of when they meet and how they meet.”
2025-07-23 · Intelligence Squared · The Safekeep, with Women’s Prize-winner Yael van der Wouden · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT