Yael van der Woden: “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Cured My Fear of Aliens” | books

My first memory is reading
I had a children’s encyclopedia on the shelf above my bed—orange and brown, the old plastic cover peeling—but I didn’t retain anything I read. I remember a book of dirty jokes that I was obsessed with when I was eight years old. I was convinced this book was off-limits to me (it wasn’t), 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 so did I aghast. I remember she was confused and took it back by muttering “I’m not judging” as she left the room.

My favorite book growing up
This must have been a novel by Thea Beckman, most likely by Hasse Simonsdochter. It was Beckman the Author for young people in the 80s and 90s in the Netherlands.

She wrote these wonderful, rich novels about teenagers forced into adulthood at a young age. Some people may know The Crusade in Jeans – the story of a 15-year-old boy in the 1970s who is accidentally transported to the 13th century and ends up leading a children’s crusade…in jeans. surprising.

The book that changed me as a teenager
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I grew up in the alien boom of the 1990s, when every two weeks there were UFO sightings and all the adults in my life were talking about the X-Files. It was very scary for me. It was my father who gave me a copy of Douglas Adams’ book. He loved her when he was young. It worked like exposure therapy, if exposure therapy also meant making the thing you’re afraid of (aliens) ridiculous (Zaphod Beeblebrox).

The writer who changed my mind
For much of my youth, I was pretty sure that I would get a rhinoplasty when I hit puberty. I did my research, I knew how much it would cost, the recovery time, everything. I was 19 years old when Nathan Englander worked at the Ministry of Special Situations out; A devastating tragicomedy that follows a couple searching for their missing son during Argentina’s “Dirty War” in 1976. There’s a scene in that novel where the desperate parents stand in front of a soldier with a photo of their son, and the soldier notices that he looks nothing like them — a different face, a different nose. This hits hard because the book begins with a series of events that lead to both parents getting rhinoplasty, which is a barter-for-a-service type of thing. I felt so sad about it for weeks. I thought the trade-off would be worth it—a stereotypical marker of my heritage for a more normative standard of beauty, a less obvious way of being—and then I read Englander’s novel and decided it wasn’t.

The book that made me want to be a writer
When I was a teenager, I wrote Jonathan Safran Foer a very serious letter declaring that I had read Everything Illuminated and that I, too, was now going to become a writer!

The book I’m back
I was twenty years old and breathing fire, desperately searching for myself in literature, which meant I culled every novel I could find that didn’t reflect myself back to me. Alan Hollinghurst’s Beauty Line is not about young Jewish women in the Netherlands. However, it is gorgeous, layered, full of desire – and it is precise. Not suitable for someone making their way through with a machete. But it is worth noting that there are scenes in that novel that have stuck in my mind for years. I returned to it, and to all of Hollinghurst’s work, in my late twenties, and was very happy to find that I had been wrong. I’m a big fan, now. I have given the Sparsholt case to almost everyone I know. I had the great pleasure of meeting Alan this year, and I was too overwhelmed and confused in that moment to tell him how much I love his work, and what it means to me. He read my book, is much calmer, and kindly told me he enjoyed it. I almost died.

The book I re-read
I love going back to Change My Mind by Zadie Smith. I first read it as an undergraduate in comparative literature, as someone whose whole life revolved around analyzing other people’s narratives, and so it was the essays that exposed the writings of others that shaped my approach to analysis. As I began publishing my own work, my interest turned to her essays on writing, the process of creating work, editing it, and returning to work. Every time I return to that collection, I find myself drawn to a different article, and that tells me a lot about the state of mind I’m in—whether I feel more like myself as a reader or a writer.

The book that I could never read again
James Baldwin Giovanni’s Room. I read it in one sitting, on a six-hour train ride to Berlin, and I was almost alone when we got on the train. Hauptbahnhof. This kind of devastation can only be felt once.

The book I discovered later in life
When we first started dating, my friend told me that the author who shaped her as a reader and writer was Elizabeth Strout. She gave me her copy of My Name is Lucy Barton. I fell in love twice: once with the book, and once with her.

The book I’m currently reading
Zadie Smith’s latest incomparable collection of essays, Dead and Alive. It’s been my entire personality these past few weeks.

Read my palm
Austin. Forgive me, I’m just one of many.