So what did you major in?” everyone asked me when I returned home to South Africa after graduating from F&M. “Creative Writing!” I said proudly. They gave a little strange nervous laugh. The looks of disbelief were only thinly veiled by a sense of underlying pity.

Out loud they said, “Oh! How wonderful! What are you going to do now?” I had my answer all ready: “I’m going to write a novel,” I told them, and the thinly disguised pity dropped its cloak. “Ohh,” they said, collectively. “Good luck with that!” While they weren’t exactly rooting for my failure, I definitely got the sense that there was a hope I’d be disappointed.

They are, of course, the strange amalgamation of parents’ friends and old school friends and doctors and check-out girls and librarians and ex-boyfriends’ parents and other arbitrary folk that form the supporting cast of my life, the web of familiarity that I get stuck in every time I return home to Durban, KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa. My city.

To them, I was the girl who was bumming off her parents, sitting at home all day pretending to have an African Art website and taking advantage of their largesse. But I wasn’t really. Every day for the next year, I sat at home writing for three or four hours. I sent my manuscript out to two carefully selected publishers, and then, wonder of wonders, my book got accepted!
Nobody could believe it, least of all me. All of a sudden my status changed. No longer was I the girl living back home at her parents’ expense. Oh no, now I was an author, and everyone wanted to talk to me about it.

I didn’t mind, not really. Who am I kidding? I loved it! Give me an opener, anything at all, as long as it has the word ‘book’ in it, and you can comfortably sit back for half an hour and not need to say a word. And now my book, Strange Nervous Laughter, has just arrived in bookstores and everyone I know (I hope!) is going to read it.

While this is possibly the most thrilling thing I can imagine, it is simultaneously rather terrifying. There are sex scenes in the book, you see. And my parents (and their friends) are going to read it. And there’s a break-up scene that rather closely approximates a break-up I had last year sometime. And, you know, I might have taken one or two things people have said to me and turned them into fiction. Possibly word for word if they were particularly witty.

But even that’s not that bad.

What really worries me, worries me so that I sometimes have a little freak-out about it, is that I feel as if I’ve sliced a large chunk of my heart out, and put it (bleeding a little) onto the pages of this book. And now everyone’s going to read it, and know me in ways that nobody except my core group of most-loveds knows me. Total strangers will be able to walk up to me and look in my eyes and know my big secret (I’ll put it in italics so you read it in a whisper: A lot of it isn’t fiction. I actually feel this way about life and love and the living of it. Even the cheesy bits! The bits I attributed to a motivational speaker. It’s all me.)And isn’t that what writing is all about? Taking those sticky truths from the inner lining of your heart and making them pretty enough for other people to read?

Good question.

I suppose I’ll find out when the supporting cast of my life reads my book. “I loved it!” they’ll say, with or without a strange nervous laugh. They have to, don’t they? But I figure I’m pretty astute at hearing the words behind the words, and by now I’m extremely familiar with that vague sense of pity and unease behind people’s exclamations.
I’ll keep you posted if I pick up a scent of it on the breeze.

Bridget McNulty graduated from F&M in 2005. She now lives in Cape Town and works as the features writer for Real Simple magazine (South Africa). Visit her website at www.bridgetmcnulty.com.