Stefan Hertmans, De Morgen called her "a literary essayist--not only because of the attractive, almost Montaigne-like form she uses when writing her essays, but also because of the place she insists on reserving for art, dreams, and desire in her critical mental exercises.

Her primary theme was to examine with great lucidity and philosophical insight the world of everyday life, death, and change, including both scientific and literary perspectives.

She achieved considerable success in Flanders and the Netherlands with her first collection of essays, Een verlangen naar ontroostbaarheid (A Longing for Inconsolability: About Life, Art and Death), with sales over 15,000 copies.

De Martelaere treats ostensibly difficult subjects such as Wittgenstein, Freud, art, religion, diaries, and love in ways that are philosophically serious without alienating the general reader.

She alternates between literature and philosophy, referring to Freud, Jung, Stendhal, and Valéry, asserting that "home is where the boredom is: a kind of psychic relaxation that makes psychological space for the re-emergence of inspiration."

The essay "Prescribed Variations" on concepts such as "seeing", "longing", "body" and "moon" "have the density of aphorisms and reveal De Martelaere’s astounding capacity to express complex material clearly while immediately linking it to a challenging vision.

"[3] In The Unexpected Answer she does not allow the writer, philosopher, husband, lover, and father Godfried H. to speak, but makes him instead the subject of six texts written from the points of view of the women who play a role in his life.