Nozizwe Cynthia Jele’s ‘Happiness is a Four-letter Word’ is the first book by a black female author to be adapted into a film, writes Mpho Tshikhudo.
Barring her great showing at the 2008 BTA Anglo Platinum short-story competition in which she won first and fourth prize, Nozizwe Cynthia Jele was a relative unknown when she turned in the manuscript for her novel Happiness is a Four-letter Word.
There was also an outside chance that the book, like many other books of the day, would fall through the cracks. That was more than four years ago and a lot has happened since then.
The book has been awarded the 2011 Commonwealth Writers’ prize for best first book in the Africa region and the M-Net Literary award in the film category.
And, in what is one for the books, so to speak, the novel is the first book by a South African black female author to be adapted into a movie. Filming started in mid-July in Johannesburg.
Tell me about the writing process. Was it a breeze?
I discovered writing late in life. I was reading a lot of books written by women for women. You know, books classified as “chick lit”. I loved the style, relevance of the issues to my situation and the humour. It took more than three years to write Happiness is a Four-letter Word, simply because I wrote when I wanted to. There was no pressure from a publisher or readers or even myself to complete the book.
What inspired the book?
Books with strong female characters like Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding, Good Grief by Lolly Winston, various works by Marian Keyes and Jennifer Weiner, and the television series Sex in the City, which was broadcast between 1998 and 2004. But before all of that there was Terry McMillan’s Waiting to Exhale.
Did you see the book eventually getting adapted for a screenplay?
Not initially, but in 2011 the book won the M-Net Literary award for film – meaning a novel with potential to be adapted into a visual medium. Bongiwe Selane, a producer, was in that year’s judging panel. She loved the book and wanted to take it on as her project. The rest is history. As it panned out, Bongiwe eventually got the film rights to the novel.
For full Q+A see Mail & Guardian
PHOTO CREDIT: Nozizwe Cynthia Jele writes about love, work, family and friends. (Delywn Verasamy, M&G)
