“You should write a book!”

I wonder how often it is that people recommend book-writing to each other and if they are sincere when making such suggestions. Or perhaps there’s a novel within each of us. It’s that vein of gold sitting just beyond our reach, hidden behind that first blank page towards literary genius. Ideally, it should spring from an innate drive for expression that just needs to be unlocked.
In many respects, we are all possible writers. What separates the potential from the bona fide published author may just be a case of nurturing.

Sometimes, we just get too bogged down living our life stories that we forget to jot it down with words.

Until someday someone says, “You should write a book!”

The first time I actually took notice was when Amanda (not her real name), one of the cool girls at the Catholic girls college I attended in Sydney pointed it out to me.

“Hey there, you’re good! You should write a book,” she said, while observing my charming assortment of words on one of our group assignments.

READ MORE: Flying fish of Baloukli, and life’s painful lessons stored in my shed

Initially, she’d groaned when we had been paired together. She had just wanted to be paired with Melissa or Rebecca or Kimberly (also not their real names) or one of her own Anglo tribe but the teacher thought it good to help us integrate.

Later at her house, I was surprised that her mother didn’t think to offer me a koulouraki, but instead eyed me curiously.

“How come you didn’t get paired with Melissa or Rebecca or Kimberly?” she asked.

“The teacher chose our pairs,” she said, there was no groan, but I sensed it and felt like chopped liver.

I invited her to my place to finish the assignment, so that she, too, could enjoy her own culture shock surrounded by Grecian columns, doilies and be offered spanakopita and tiropita by a mother eager to grill her daughter’s “friends”.
She never came. In fact, she disappeared on me as that is what, I guess, the socially busy Amandas of our high school years must do, or at least that’s what they did back then.

READ MORE: Underwogs: George Megalogenis explores Australia’s multi generational migrant experience

So, I did all the work myself, and as a reward our names got equal billing on an A+ project on the feudal system in Medieval England.

One might think I got the raw end of the deal, but any “invisible” socially awkward teenager knows the value of recognition by a member of the “in” crowd. Or at least, that is how it was during the “wog” years.

These days, the definitions have changed – or so my daughters tell me. Or maybe the “wog years” were just in our minds.

And that is how Amanda noticed that, indeed, I could pull off a sentence better than most though my parents spoke broken English. But eloquence was not as powerful a gift as the all-important know-how needed to match sweaters with ripped jeans, the type that my mother would never let me wear.

Or at least that’s what I imagined Amanda wore out of school because at our slightly snooty college we just had ugly blue uniforms – which looked uglier on some more than others.

“Maybe someday I will write books,” I beamed, imagining myself sitting amongst authors I admired.

“I’ll read you,” Amanda promised. And that is how my first and last personal interaction with popular Amanda ended as we never spoke again throughout the rest of our high school years.

It was just a sweet interlude between an Anglo-Saxon popular high school beauty and the wog outcast who had nothing more in common beyond their identical sky blue uniforms and navy blue blazers.

We then smiled kindly at each other before taking different corridors, each stretching the old school tie towards a totally different direction in life and I never did write a book.

I wonder what might have happened had she said “Let’s hang out together. You might be fun” – or not. And maybe, had we met at another point in our lives or at another time of Australia’s migration history – a Greek girl and an Anglo girl may have indeed been bosom buddies, but those were the wog years when people preferred to hang out with their own tribes, or at least with people whose names they could pronounce.

So I guess, “You should write a book!” was more than enough acknowledgment at that point in time.