03/05/2026
I read Maurice by E.M. Forster on my very first proper holiday: I was twenty-one, newly a student, newly the owner of a student loan that I put to the terrifying use that is a two-week stint in Tuscany. I’d never been away with a friend that long, never been to Italy, never quite done the summer getaway and had sky-high expectations and was surprised to find that I was, instead, quite sad. There was no reason for my sadness other than the heat, which I love, depressed me; the landscape, which was beautiful, made me feel impossibly alone in the world. And then I read Maurice. I recall finishing it at 3AM in the top bunk of a hostel bed, a flashlight in hand, facing a wide-open window that overlooked a mountain range. Lights blinked in the night, villages in the distance, I finished the novel and all at once I went from not feeling enough, to feeling everything. I think in Forster’s writing I found something that spoke to me as, yes, a baby gay in the make, but more primordially than that: as a big-time yearner. As someone who wanted to know themselves, who had to contend with the fact that the self was a forever changing thing and therefore unknowable in a static way, and as someone who yearned—for people, for friends, for a holiday as it exists only in the mind. The good house as it exists only in novels. For novels, as they only come to one rarely: a home, not a reflection of the self, but a place where one might find shelter.
Yael van der Wouden – The Safekeep
