Writing About Hope

The Millions published Yael van der Wouden Wants to Touch Everything, which I read for a reason that now eludes me. What I found was better.

JMJ: Finally, there’s a great hopefulness to the book. What is your relationship to hope, as a writer and also as a human?

YvdW: This is perhaps an unpopular opinion, but 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. That’s more or less my relationship to hope, I think. It’s hard work, but God, isn’t it impressive when it works?

One problem with dealing with my depression was recognizing it was more than the cynicism/pessimissim that had been my usual frame of reference. I should known better - despondency left me without any sense of humor and without any sense of just crashing into what bothered me. Hope is both a burden and a relief. We cannot live without it, but all too often life seems hopeless. 

Since reading that interview, The Guardian reviewed her novel, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden review – the Dutch house.

The book’s third act, though, is inspired. It belongs to Eva, and with her the novel comes into its own. Even if you’ve already guessed at her own family’s wartime story, the detail revealed in this last act still has the power to kick you in the gut. If you haven’t, then to divulge more here would be to issue the mother of all spoilers. Suffice to say, the German occupation is still very recent, as are the atrocities, injustices and opportunism that flourished under their watch. The book’s powerful final act provides an already weighty emotional situation with an extra layer of historical heft.

Betwen interview and review, the novel sounds worth reading. Not for content but for inspiration, too. We need that while bombs fall in Gaza and Ukraine.

sch 6/3