The Stolen Queen follows a dual-timeline story taking us first to New York in 1978 where a 60-year-old, shy, studious woman named Charlotte Cross, working as a curator at the Metropolitan Museum, is unwillingly teamed up with a 19-year-old overexcited staffer for the Met Ball named Annie to track down a stolen artifact. These two women could not be more different and to Cairo they go. There’s a cameo from Diana Vreeland who made the Met Ball what it is. Fiona called her ‘a tornado’ of a woman.

Fiona’s fast-paced, detail-rich novel, which she describes as part Indiana Jones, part Thelma and Louise and part The Devil Wears Prada, made me want to hop on a plane to Cairo. I wanted to experience the hazy sand-filled orange sky, the ancient tombs in the Valley of the Kings, and the chaotic maize-like streets of Cairo.

We travel back in time to 1936 Egypt where a much younger 18-year-old Charlotte heads to Egypt as part of her university studies to be the Girl Friday for a group of archaeologists. There, tragedy strikes causing Charlotte to flee Egypt, never to return again until fate intervenes 42 years later, ie 1978.

Elena: What is your process? Do you start with the story or the building?

The building definitely. I was a journalist before I started writing fiction, and so doing all that research is important to me. That’s where all my story ideas come from.  I try and not think about characters or story, just let the history wash over me and little details will start to stick. It’s just a matter of doing enough research and trusting my gut.

For the research on the New York Public Library for The Lions of Fifth Avenue, I found that they built a seven-room apartment deep inside the library for the super and his family to live in. They lived there for 30 years. Their daughter was born in the library.  I read that and thought, okay, a family living in the library, where do I go from there?

 Elena: And for The Stolen Queen, what sparked that story?

 I saw that the pharaoh Hatshepsut had a whole gallery at the Met and realised wow, this was an important woman. And then I learned about how she was really lost to history.  That’s one of the things I’m drawn to, every book I’ve done, there’s been some character inspired by a woman who got shafted.

Elena:  Can you tell us a little bit about Hatshepsut?

 Hatshepsut was Egyptian royalty. She married her half-brother at the age of 12 as one did in Egyptian royalty. He died not long after and she didn’t have a son. And so, the, the crown went to the son of one of the concubines, but it was a baby.

So, in the meantime, Hatshepsut stepped up and became the regent. And she ruled as the Pharaoh for 20 years, very successfully. There were all these advances, peace and prosperity. And then she died. And at some point, her stepson, who came to power, ordered many of her statues destroyed, her images hacked out of any reliefs. And so because of that, Hatshepsut was really lost to history. People knew she ruled, but they didn’t know much about her.

And it wasn’t until the Met team were doing a dig in the 1920s, they found this huge quarry filled with her statues and realized, she must have been very important. But what happened? And they said, well, it must’ve been that the stepson was angry that she ruled for so long.  The Met catalog described her in the fifties as a vain, ambitious, unscrupulous woman and a detested stepmother.

But then 10 years later a scholar found that the destruction had to have happened at least 24 years after her death which is a long time to hold a grudge. And they realized, no, it was about the line of succession. The stepson wanted his son to rule and didn’t want the idea of a female pharaoh out in the zeitgeist. So that’s why he did it. Her journey as a woman pharaoh has been fraught in a way that male pharaohs rarely are.

Elena: Did you always know you wanted to write a book?

 Never. No way. I loved reading, but never could have written a book. It wasn’t until I was about 45 and started. I had a story idea that I couldn’t shake and I wanted to read the book. And so I thought, I’ll just try writing, but I won’t tell a soul. No one will know. And that did eventually morph into my first book and I’m glad I waited. because when I was younger, I had nothing to say on the page. I hadn’t really lived life enough.

November, 2025

Whenever I choose a book for the podcast, I’m looking for beautiful writing, a compelling story and themes that resonate with me. My latest pick, Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar by debut author Katie Yee ticked all those boxes.

It’s a slim novel of 199 pages, a comic tragedy that reminded me a little of Nora Ephron’s Heartburn.  Both stories involve a cheating husband, a heartbroken wife, but the protagonists are very different. Nora’s protagonist is angry and funny and finds consolation in food and recipes. Katie’s protagonist is watchful, less angry, funny, and finds consolation in stories. The book title Maggie; Or, a Man and a Woman Walk into a Bar makes you think of an old joke. Only when the protagonist walks into a bar, or in this case an all-you-can-eat Indian buffet restaurant with her husband, he tells her he’s having an affair with a white woman named Maggie. Soon after the protagonist discovers she has breast cancer and names the tumor Maggie.

Now divorce, cancer, not such cheery topics, but in Katie’s hands, I kept laughing, not loud, raucous laughter, but more chuckling about the narrator’s relatable observations. She hates the tiny triangular paper cups in the doctor’s waiting room that never hold enough water and the outdated cheesy magazines. She never sees issues of the Atlantic or the New Yorker. Maybe, she muses, because people who read those magazines are too smart to get cancer. She writes ‘The Guide to My Husband: A User’s Manual” and ponders whether she should give it to Maggie, the mistress, not the tumor.

When I asked Katie what she hoped readers would take away from her novel, she said:

I hope readers feel like they can revisit and retell their own story. They don’t have to hold onto stories that are not serving them. They can take the pen back.

Katie talks about how we each have our origin stories, including, in the novel’s case, how the narrator met her husband. But when he left her, she realized that story didn’t work for her anymore. I experienced that same thing when my husband and I divorced. I remember thinking what do I do with all those stories, the photo albums, the letters (we met way before email), the shared memories. It was a big chunk of my brain and heart. I had to find a different origin story with a new ending.

Katie said it doesn’t need to be a long marriage; any relationship can work its way into our origin story.

Who among us, she said, has not dated someone for a little bit too long just because the meet cute story was so good. I dated this guy right out of college. We met on the subway, and he asked me what I was reading, and I was like, this is it. A meet cute to end all meet cutes. And, you know, he wasn’t amazing. But I was like, I think we just have to hang on because the universe would never have given me a story so good if it wasn’t supposed to work out.

Another element to Katie’s novel that I loved was how the protagonist mothered her young children. She doesn’t  pressure them to be a certain way, to get top grades. Unlike her ex, she doesn’t correct mistakes on their homework. Instead, the mother can’t wait to see what individuals her children will turn out to be. I asked Katie if this was how she grew up.

Absolutely. While I’m not myself a mother, so much of the motherhood aspect of the book, I’ve really pulled from my relationship to my own mother. I completely credit my mother and her curiosity about me and her love of storytelling. I was never sent to bed without a bedtime story. My mom was a classics major as an undergraduate, so she would tell me kid-friendly versions of all the Greek myths, and some Chinese myths that she knew.

She would also do this cool thing, a parenting hack, where she would tell me a story and then she would say, okay, now it’s your turn. And this is kind of a nice way if you’re tired of entertaining your kids, you let them entertain you.

I remember she’d pick me up after preschool, take me to a diner where we’d get French fries and a vanilla milkshake and we would just tell each other stories. I wanted the narrator in the book to look at her children with that same curiosity and love.

And the other main way Katie’s novel resonated with me, was through the narrator’s best friend Darlene. Everyone should have a Darlene in their lives, the friend who knows exactly what we need before we do, who knows what to stay at tense moments, who gets us and is there for us when the going gets tough.  When the narrator asks Darlene how she thinks Maggie, the mistress, is in bed,

 Darlene replies terrible. She looks like a real pillow princess. … She lies there like a dead fish! Doesn’t move her hips.  She fakes orgasms, but in the ways guys like.

Katie told me Darlene was an important character for me to write into this book because there are so many “divorce novels” out there. But I’m always like, where is her best friend? For me personally, I’ve never had to go through anything difficult in my life without the help or the shoulder or the ear of a very best friend. I’m lucky in that I’ve got a couple of Darlene’s in my life.

And I have a couple of Darlene’s in my life, who always make the bad times a little less bad. You know who you are.

The above has been edited for clarity and brevity. You can listen to the full episode here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author, or wherever you choose to listen to podcasts.

November 2025

We follow these two girls, Homa and Ellie as adventurous, playful seven-year-olds through to adolescence and young adulthood and beyond. We learn about their hopes and dreams, losses and struggles, joys and sorrows. And we read about how the seemingly indestructible friendship is jeopardized by a single act of betrayal.

Marjan’s writing makes me feel like I am smack in the middle of these neighbourhoods, uptown, downtown, the schools, the bizarre, the parties. I felt the freedom these girls enjoyed walking down the street in their stylish clothes in the sixties and seventies with their beehive hairdos. This makes the eighties after the revolution in 1979 when Iranian women lost all those freedoms that much more painful. The new government listens in on phone calls, reads private letters, spies, imprisons protesters. Importantly, Marjan is careful to keep the turbulent and violent times in the background of her story, while the tale of how these young girls grew up to become amazing women is always in the foreground.

Below are some edited abbreviated highlights from our conversation. You can listen to the full Q&A here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.

Elena: Marjan, hello and welcome to the show.

Marjan: Hello, Elena. Thank you so much for having me.

Elena: I am so happy to have you. I got lost in the world of these girls as they grew up and their friendship blossomed and then was severely tested. It’s all about the story. It’s a great way to learn about history without really realizing you’re learning about history, if you know what I mean.

Marjan: That’s the best way to learn about history. I really think books save us. They keep us grounded and they keep us tethered. And stories for me are the best way to learn about the news and history because you get a deeper perspective, a deeper education. I could read an article in the newspaper, and I can read the headlines, but when I read a book,  I’m immersed in the story, I really feel like I get to know that world.

You can time travel through books. There’s also a lot of therapy in reading because you feel less alone and you see how other people have felt what you felt, even if they live on the other side of the planet. It’s just a very immersive and healing experience.

Elena: I read that you were working on another story when the idea for this novel came to you. Can you tell us about that?

Yes. After, my second novel, The Stationery Shop came out my career changed because that book was a bestseller, and I felt under great pressure to write the next one.  I had written over a hundred pages of this other novel about moms in suburbia and firstborns going off to college.

But when the pandemic happened, I found some posts on Instagram of my own childhood friend and seeing her face again just brought back so many memories for me. I was flooded with not just memories but emotions.  I felt as though I could remember the texture of our friendship. I could remember her mom.  I remembered how we used to play together every day and share our dreams. And I realized how these friendships we make in childhood really shape us because. Her influence on my life has lasted even though the friendship hasn’t. And so, I just thought again about how friendship breakups are just as heart wrenching as romantic ones.

Except we don’t have as many songs for them although my daughter tells me Taylor Swift does.

Elena: lol

 But what I knew in my heart then was that I really wanted to write the story of a broken friendship. So, I had to take a deep breath, put aside that other book that I had started to write, and that’s when I started The Lion Women of Tehran.

I made up Ellie and Homa. And I deliberately made them born the year my mother was born -1943- because by doing that, I could show the arc in the background of the women’s rights movement in Iran.

The Women’s Rights Movement in Iran officially began in the 1920s. That’s when the first women’s rights organizations began. So, throughout the twenties, thirties, forties, women were working hard organizing. And then in Iran, a lot changed in the fifties, which coincides with Ellie and Homa’s burgeoning friendship and their girlhood.

And then as they come of age in the sixties, women got the right to vote, and then a lot of laws which were harmful to women changed to benefit them, such as the age of marriage, divorce laws, child custody laws, a lot of things. And so, we see as Ellie and Homa become women, how their womanhood sort of echoes this expanded world.

And then in the seventies, so much of that freedom is taken for granted, but then those rights are later taken away. So that’s a movement in the background. But the core of the story is this friendship between these two girls who later grow up to become women.

Elena: I really loved the beginning when they become friends age seven, playing hopscotch, that annoying boy, spirited Homa doing pranks on studious Ellie.  It was all so believable. We all were seven at one point.

 I feel it’s such a fleeting time in real life. But also, on the page in a lot of adult novels, we don’t spend too much time in girlhood. But I think this time that you’re mentioning – girlhood – is when the sassiness and innocence and confidence is still there in girls before it gets eroded with adolescence and all those insecurities.

It’s such a special time and I really enjoyed writing those scenes and being there with Ellie and Homa, like you said, when they’re playing hopscotch or just having their first ‘play date’ The first time you go to a friend’s house is your foray into the world outside of your family, and that strong bond that you create with a friend sometimes is like a blueprint for later romantic relationships because you are learning how to navigate the world that doesn’t associate you with your own family in any way.

So, when Ellie goes to Homa’s house, it’s really the first time she’s not in a relative’s house. She’s thinking, so this is how this family functions. This is what their kitchen is like. This is what her mother is like. It’s a way to open your eyes to blueprints of family dynamics that you maybe didn’t know existed.

Elena: Totally. Your descriptions of Tehran back in the fifties are so authentic. I imagine your mother must have been a good source.

Yes. It’s always a compliment slash slight shock when a reader writes to me and says, I love how you brought to life your childhood in the 1950s.

Elena: I hate that.

 On the one hand, it’s a huge compliment. On the other hand, it’s like, hmm, how old do I look?

I was in a position of privilege because I had access to all these people in my family who had lived In Tehran in the 1950s before I was born. I only lived in Iran for a very short time, so I bugged every known relative, and a lot of people didn’t want to speak to me. They’re like, oh my goodness, enough with the questions. I don’t know, we just did what we did. We lived our lives.

And I’d be like, no, but can you please explain to me what you were wearing and what your shoes looked like? And where in particular did you eat when you were in college? Did you go out? Did you eat in the cafeteria?  I bugged a lot of people, but yes, for the Lion Women of Tehran, my mom was my number one victim, and she did speak to me.

So, Ellie and Homa go to my mother’s high school. She described it for me, and I needed to know how were you seated in the classroom? Did you each have a desk? Did you share a desk? Like, tell me about the layout and the teachers. And particularly as you mentioned, I needed to know everything about what they ate because I am a foodie and so it really interested me.

Elena: Homa and Ellie are very different people. Homa is from a modest background. She doesn’t care about wealth. She wants to be a judge. When she grows up, she wants to right unfairness wherever she sees it.

Ellie’s family has a lot more money. Ellie is prettier and Ellie marries Mehrdad, the boy everyone has a crush on and yet Ellie is jealous of Homa from the first time they meet when she sees that Homa is missing her two front teeth. And Ellie wishes she was missing some teeth too. Can you talk about their friendship and what attracted one to the other?

 Ellie, to begin with, perhaps by nature or perhaps by the nurture of her narcissistic mother, she has a jealous trait. So, Ellie is almost primed to be jealous. When they’re seven years old in that first scene when they meet, Ellie isn’t that into Homa. She’s like, who is this girl? She’s annoying me. She’s poking me, she’s giggling. Where’s the friend I thought I would meet?

But Ellie can’t help but be won over by Homa because Homa has a characteristic that Ellie covets. Homa is unabashedly herself. She’s comfortable in her skin. She has nothing to hide, nothing to cover. She is not insecure. She’s a confident soul and she believes what she believes. She doesn’t feel as though she needs to adjust or tweak in any way, which Ellie does. So, I think Ellie is very much attracted to Homa’s natural charisma and to Homa’s confidence and how she feels comfortable in her skin.

And what does Homa see in Ellie? Homa has that proverbial heart of gold and maybe she senses Ellie’s discomfort. Maybe Homa is one of those people whose vibrations are tuned to other people’s pretty well, and she sees this girl and she’s nice and she just wants to, basically, initially just wants to play hopscotch.

And then I think she sees a lot of potential in Ellie that’s being unmet and she’s no fool Homa. She knows that Ellie’s family life is worse than hers, even though Ellie ends up having more money and initially had more money. Homa knows Ellie craves having a father and that Ellie deep down wishes she had a different mother. So, I think Homa is just very empathetic and takes Ellie into her fold.

Elena: How did you balance the historical accuracy with the storytelling? 

 In writing historical fiction, and particularly in writing historical fiction about Iran, I have to be very accurate. So, I did not make up any historical events.

I don’t want to make up a historical event that did not exist for the purposes of my story. So, everything I write about that’s historical happened. Ellie and Homa, I made up their friendship. I made up their families. But the women’s march that happened in Iran in March 1979, I did not make up.

Thousands of women did march in the streets for days on end because they were worried about what may come. And so, the revolution, the war, all those things are historically accurate, and fact checked.

Now here’s what I think about the balance. If you want to read a history book, then you are going to read a history book. There are many excellent history books about what happened in any country.

But if you are reading fiction, I think that a reader wants a story. They’re there for the story and for the characters. So personally, as a writer, I like the historical events to serve as a background and for the relationship between the characters to serve as the foreground. I always think back to what EL Doctorow said, and if I may name drop at this moment, he was my professor at my creative writing MFA program at NYU.

He said history shows us what happened, but fiction shows us how what happened, make people feel. And I am so much more interested in that. How did that make the people feel? How did that affect a friendship? How did that affect a romance? How did that affect a parent-child relationship? That kind of a thing.

Elena:  Can we talk about your title, The Lion Women of Tehran. Homa is clearly a lioness as she fights to protect women to the end, but are there other ways to be a lioness, more subtle ways? Would you say the term lioness applies to other characters your book?

 Yes, I would. You know, of the two friends, Homa is the easy lion woman because you just look at her. She has a sense of social justice from when she’s a kid. She becomes an activist at a very young age. She sees an injustice; she wants to fix it. She’s out on the streets marching.

But I think you can be a lioness even if you don’t do all those things. So, when we think of Ellie, Ellie wants to be pretty and loved and to marry a really nice guy and to have children and to enjoy the simple pleasures of life or what Homa would dub the bourgeois pleasures of life.

But that’s who she is. And I think she is also a lion woman because it takes an extraordinary amount of courage to live a very ordinary life, to be at home holding down the fort, to be the wife, to be the mother, as though that’s a simple job, which it’s not at all. And so yes, Ellie is also a lion woman.

Through my readers, I have learned that some believe Ellie’s mother to be a lion woman. And that surprised me because I didn’t. She started off being such an archetype of a narcissistic parent, but they showed me the parts of her that did require a tremendous amount of courage as well.

Elena: What would you like readers to take away from the book?

 Ideally, I hope that this read is healing because Homa goes through a lot, Ellie goes through a lot.,  I don’t think it’s the fact that we don’t have losses in life because we all have losses in life. We all experience loss, but it’s the way you balance the losses in your life with the gains in your life that matters.

And I feel that Ellie and Homa heal and so I hope it’s healing to finish the book.

The other thing I hope readers take away is that freedom is fragile. Freedom is not guaranteed. There was a time which we see in the book when women thought they were good. They were done; they were guaranteed these rights. And then we see that the pendulum can swing, and those rights can be taken away. I cannot tell you the disbelief and the incredulous aspect of this. Before the revolution people were like, of course that wouldn’t happen here. Are you kidding me? That can’t happen here. Look at us. We are the most progressive, westernized country in this region. Those things can change. It is scary because you just don’t realize how quickly things can change.

And the last  thing I hope they take away is really the lasting influence of friendship. You don’t need to stay in touch. You don’t need to continue the friendship for that friendship’s influence to matter and to shape you as a person.

Elena: Thank you so much, Marjan. I really enjoyed talking to you. I so appreciate your taking the time. Thank you.

Marjan: Thank you so much. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you for having me.

Elena: Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

August, 2025

Think Daphne de Moyer’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.

Isabel has no friends, no life really. Her weeks consist of mundane errands -going to the butcher, the baker, visiting her banker to see about her allowance. She has two brothers, Henrik and Louis who left home years ago and who rarely visit. She resents them for their carefree life while she dutifully maintains the house, and everything in it from the crockery to the curtains. Her younger brother Henrik fled as a teenager when their rigid cold mother disapproved of his sexuality. He lives with his Algerian boyfriend, Sebastian.

And the older brother Louis  is a bit of a womanizer, falling in and out of love easily. Most annoying to Isabel, Louis is set to inherit the house once he marries and settles down.

Isabel’s world is upended when Louis brings his latest girlfriend, Ava, to live at the house, one long hot summer while he travels on a work project.

Isabelle can’t stand Ava. Her badly dyed hair, her sloppy ways, getting up late, going to bed late, the way she touches everything in the house and asks so many questions. Who is this annoying woman? And then Isabel starts to suspect Ava of stealing. A teaspoon has gone missing, then a plate, she becomes obsessed watching Ava’s every move.

And that’s just part one in a three-part book. Below is an edited, condensed version of our conversation. You can listen to the full interview here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author.

Elena: Yael, welcome to the show. I’m so glad you could make it.

Yael: Oh, I’m thrilled to be here. That was a great introduction. I don’t think I’ve been able to summarize the book better than that., so I might steal parts of it.

Elena: Very funny. I read that you wrote this book in just six months, that the idea for the novel came to you between two family funerals in the Netherlands. Can you tell us where the seed to the novel started at and your process of writing the Safe Keep? Had the ideas been percolating for a while?

 I went to two funerals and in between them, I looked out over the fields and the idea came to me. When I was a kid, what I would do when I couldn’t fall asleep is I would do mind theatre. I would imagine putting the VCR on and pressing play on my favorite Disney movie. And then I would just play the whole movie in my head from beginning to end, or as far as I could get before falling asleep. I would do this every single night. Most often it was 101 Dalmatians.

Elena: Great movie

I would just go into the latest scene of a movie or a story that I made up myself and disappear into that. And I think that’s something I reached for in the grief between the two funerals.

I think I was looking for a story that would distract me wholly. And the idea of Isabel and the house and a stranger coming in took hold of me. The truth is that the themes have been percolating for years. The frustration I’d felt with how the Dutch memorialize their history but also questions of complicity and culpability throughout history. These are conversations that I’ve been having for years and years and years as an academic, but also as a reader. And then all of it came together quickly after that,

Elena: So, when you moved to Holland from Israel, how old were you?

I was 10. My father is Dutch. Hence my last name.

Elena: What was your experience as a Jewish person moving from Israel to the Netherlands?

At this moment in time, I hesitate to talk about my childhood experiences. because I’m always afraid that it’s going to be taken out of context or seen in the wrong light when I compare Israel to the Netherlands.  I hesitate to speak of Israel with any kind of nostalgia, especially in this current climate because I do want to be careful of creating nostalgia around Israel and its politics.

(Having said that), there was an intense cultural backlash moving to a part of a country where I was one of a handful of Jewish children, I think maybe max five, and I mean, the other ones were my sisters and cousins.

I experienced quite a lot of strange, funny, but also painful, antisemitic moments there. I have this one memory of walking across the playground, just outside of high school, and this girl and this guy, they were just hardcore making out. They were just going for it. Leaning against the bike rack. And then the girl removes the guy’s face from her face, like you can almost hear the smooching sound of it, and she shouts across the yard, in Dutch…. ‘Are you that Jew girl?’

Elena: Wow. What did you say?

You say yes, and then you keep walking. There were more intense moments of children who I believe didn’t quite know what they were doing or had decided to be edgy, and would carve swastikas into lockers or tables, or would draw cartoons of me and then slip them so I could see them.

Elena: Right.

Not only did I go from a place where I didn’t have to think much about my identity as a Jewish person to but suddenly, I had to also explain that identity to a community who’s only understanding of Jewishness was the Holocaust or Anne Frank or from antisemitic tropes, the bread and butter of Dutch storytelling sometimes.

It was a whiplash in many ways, going from knowing a language and knowing your friends to trying to figure out how popularity works in a place where you don’t understand the cultural conventions.

Elena: You set your novel in 1961. Why?

 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 had either been reshaped or emptied out. And in the Dutch language there’s remnants of Yiddish from 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. 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: Yeah, that was very good. Did you really write the book in six months?

 I did.

Elena: Amazing.

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 writing. Not only did I have outlines upon outlines, I had color-coded flashcards.

Elena: Wow.

 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 I want, the cadence, the rhythm. I create the plot and the outlining so I can experiment with language.

Elena: So, you’re free?

  I’m free of the plot. Yes

Elena: Can you tell us a bit about Isabel’s conflicted relationship with her two brothers, Henrik and Louis.

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.

 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.

Andbon 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.

 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:  Was it easy for you to write suspense or did you have to go back and edit out things to make it sparer?

Yes. 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

 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: exactly

She doesn’t only halt continuously when she speaks, but also in her internal monologues. In some of the scenes that we see through her eyes, the knowledge is constantly hinted at and taken away. And this is also how Dutch society works. You are given hints of something, and it’s taken away, and you’re not encouraged to think about it too much.

It’s just snatches of realization that are then taken away. It was very interesting indeed to see what creates tension and what releases tension and when I needed to really pull it as tight as possible. But you cannot go on with high tension forever. You need to have moments of relaxation or hope or something else. And to see exactly how much I could make sure that you do want to continue reading, that you don’t get tired of the heightened emotion of it all.

Elena: As you’re writing the book, are you thinking of it a bit like a film?

 Now we’re back to 101 Dalmations. My parents both worked in 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: What would you like readers to take away from this book?

 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.

 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  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  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. I know we’re out of time. Thank you so much. I really appreciate your making the time.

July, 2025