There is no shortage of books, podcasts and neatly packaged advice telling us how to become the best version of ourselves. There are five-step plans, morning routines and enough motivational quotes to make you feel like you have failed simply by sleeping in past 6am.
Written as a fictional nine-step self-help guide, Mia Arderne’s "How to Stop Being a Naai" follows 45-year-old Lucian as his relationship, career and former life as a DJ begin to unravel.
On the brink of a separation, disillusioned at work and desperately clinging to his glory days as a DJ, Lucian confronts the toxic truth about himself: Yes, he is a naai.
In his attempt at reformation, Lucian stumbles his way through nine steps - from ruthless self-acceptance - to ultimately channelling he’s inner naai. In other words, he will try anything except go to actual therapy.
'How to Stop being a Naai' is a satirical take on the self-help genre. It serves as a brutally funny, fictional guide to become a better person.
Because, if we’re being honest there’s a bit of a night in most of us.
In the novel, Lucian may have to consider that he is not simply surrounded by difficult people. He might be the problem.
That is where the novel finds its bite. Arderne uses Lucian’s unraveling to explore self-accountability, asking what happens when understanding your past is no longer enough to excuse your behaviour in the present.
Arderne first conceived the idea as a “self-help guide to being not a naai”, and that irreverent premise carries through the novel. Beneath the humour, the book is really about confronting the parts of yourself that are easier to blame on everyone else.
What does the writer do well?
I am an absolute fan of Arderne’s writing. So much of it felt familiar to me, from the idioms I grew up hearing, to the way she uses language and the shifts between English and Kaaps.
As a writer, I really appreciated the code-switching because it feels like the way people actually speak rather than language being cleaned up for the page.
Her storytelling also pulled me right in. At times, I felt like I was in the club with Lucian, watching him ask for his double brandy and Coke – a classic South African drink if you are not a beer lover. Those little details made the world feel real.
She also puts together a playlist to go with the storyline, with the music becoming part of the novel as you read. I really enjoyed that because it added to the feeling that you were right there with Lucian.
Then there is the comedy. Arderne gets the balance right. I was irritated with Lucian and some of the other “naaiers” one minute, then found myself understanding them a little more once we saw where some of that “naaierigheid” came from.
That is what I think comedy does so well here. It lets Arderne call out the things we would rather ignore without making the book feel like a lecture. She can make you laugh at the behaviour, recognise yourself in some of it and then quietly wonder: “Shit, am I a naai too?”
What is the book saying about the world now?
The way I see it, we cannot help the world we are born into. We arrive in a place that is already messy, where dysfunction is part of the script, and we are all just trying our best with what we were handed.
"How to Stop Being a Naai" asks what happens when “that’s just how I am” becomes an excuse.
We live in a world obsessed with fixing ourselves. There is always another podcast, book, TikTok expert or morning routine telling us how to become better people.
Arderne flips that idea around: perhaps becoming better starts with admitting that you are sometimes the problem.
There are so many hurt people walking around and, as the saying goes, hurt people hurt people. The things we choose not to address do not simply disappear. They eventually find their way into our relationships, our work and our behaviour, often in ways we never expected.
Through Lucian, Arderne also looks at masculinity, emotional maturity and that very human need to be seen, particularly through his life as a DJ and his hunger for validation from people he does not even know.
The beauty is that she does all this with humour. We can laugh, recognise the naaier in someone else and then realise we might have one in us too.
How Arderne changes it up?
Arderne takes the familiar self-help format and gives it a distinctly South African personality. There is plenty of swearing and language that is often frowned upon, but it never feels like it is there simply for shock value.
It belongs to the characters and the world they occupy.
The Kaaps, code-switching, idioms and everyday expressions add to that familiarity too. As someone who grew up hearing many of these phrases, I found myself recognising the language rather than stopping to process it.
That matters because so much writing can feel like it has been scrubbed clean for the page.
Even the word “naai” gets more room to breathe than simply being an insult. Arderne turns it into something to question. What makes someone a "naai"? Is it the things we do, the way we treat people or the excuses we make afterwards?
The self-help format also gives her plenty of room to play with the genre while telling a story about a man who has some serious things to confront. And, if we are being honest, some of those things can hit a little closer to home than we might like.
How we are formed
What I found myself thinking about most while reading "How to Stop Being a Naai" was how little of who we become is actually formed in isolation.
The families we grow up in, the people we love, the people who hurt us and the choices we make in response to those experiences all leave their mark. We carry those things into adulthood, sometimes without even realising how much they are influencing the way we think and behave.
“We become naaiers to protect ourselves from one another” is probably the line that stayed with me most. It sounds funny because, well, it has the word “naaiers” in it, there is a serious idea underneath.
Sometimes the behaviour we find most difficult in other people started as a way of protecting themselves.
“It’s not easy to look your demon in the face. But it is necessary to see it before slapping it in its gevriet”, had me laughing, but it also hit a little closer to home. I actually have a tattoo that says “Fight off your demons”, so reading this made me think about what that really means.
Fighting your demons is not necessarily about pretending they are not there or trying to outrun them. Sometimes you have to look at them properly first, understand where they came from and accept the part they have played in shaping you.
That does not mean giving them an excuse to run your life. For me, that is what makes the line important. You cannot change something you refuse to see. Sometimes the first step is admitting that the thing you have been fighting has been sitting with you all along.
I particularly loved the line, “the smallest dent in the greatest evil is still progress”. There are so many quotes in this book that I could probably write an entire piece just dissecting them, but this one really stuck with me. I like the idea that even the smallest positive change still counts.
We can be so hard on ourselves when we do not completely transform something overnight; as if change only matters when it is big enough for everyone else to notice.
Sometimes it is simply making one better choice than you did yesterday, responding differently, admitting you were wrong, or finally doing something you have been avoiding.
“She loves you but she shouldn’t, but she does” speaks to something more complicated: knowing that a relationship or situation is wrong does not mean the feelings attached to it simply switch off.
That is probably why I connected with the book. Lucian’s racing thoughts often felt familiar. Not because I am Lucian, but because I recognised that constant attempt to make sense of ourselves, our choices and the people who helped shape us.
We need more coloured writers
This book is for anyone who has ever had to take a proper look at themselves and admit that perhaps they were not completely innocent in a situation. Judging comes easily when we are pointing out the faults of others, but it is a lot harder to look at our own flaws, and be honest about them.
More than that, I think it is an important reminder of why we need more coloured writers telling stories in the way only we can.
There is something about seeing your language, humour, experiences and the little things you grew up with sitting on the page that hits differently. We need more of those stories, not cleaned up or made more palatable, but told as they are.
As a writer, reading Arderne’s work actually made me want to write a book of my own. If that is not a sign that a story has done something right, I don't know what is.
bernelee.vollmer@nationalmg.co.za