When Golda Fried, BA’94, left the composition class she teaches at a community college in Greensboro, North Carolina, one October day in 2005, she realized that her cell phone was clogged with messages. Her initial panic – “I thought someone had died” – gave way to joy when she found out that her book, Nellcott is My Darling, had been nominated for a Governor General’s Literary Award.

“I really didn’t think they gave them to books from small presses,” she laughs. “I was in total shock. Even my publisher was surprised.”

Justin Morgan

Given all the critical kudos garnered by Nellcott, the nomination shouldn’t have come as such a jolt. The Montreal Mirror described the book as “one of those rare novels that captures innocence without resorting to nostalgia,” while the Globe and Mail hailed it as a “sensitive, sensual, funny and accurate map of the rocky and mystifying territory between childhood and maturity.”

It’s hard to imagine Nellcott being written by anyone but a McGill graduate, steeped as the book is in the day-to-day experiences of a McGill student in the ’90s. Fried’s novel tells the tale of Alice Charles, a naive and quirky young woman who leaves the warm and insular confines of her family home in Toronto to attend McGill. Living in residence, the neurotic newcomer is surrounded by a menagerie of fellow undergrads, all in various stages of self-absorption. Alice’s Wonderland is turned upside down when she falls for Nellcott Ragland, the proverbial boy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks, who wears black eyeliner and works in a record store.

The 34-year-old Fried admits that reading a pair of coming-of-age novels (Leonard Cohen’s The Favourite Game and Daniel Richler’s Kicking Tomorrow) inspired her to try her own hand at the genre. Adhering to the adage “write what you know,” Fried shares a lot in common with her protagonist – although the author admits that she condensed several years of her own experience into Alice’s inaugural one. For starters, both are Torontonians whose fathers are proud, chest-thumping McGill alumni. And, like Alice, Fried arrived at McGill as a wide-eyed freshman, just 17 years old.

Fried is particularly adept at capturing the sights and sounds of residence life and the massive internal upheaval that many students experience when they move away from home for the first time. “Initially, I was really intimidated,” she says. “I didn’t have a lot of friends coming in.”

Like her creator, Alice tries to meet people by becoming the secretary of the ill-fated Film Society, where members spend as much time arguing about which film to show (“You guys had to pick the most obscure Rolling Stones movie, didn’t you?”) to the merits of serving Pop Tarts instead of popcorn.

And while shout outs to the Leacock Building and the Bifteck bar will be welcomed by alumni like old friends, the appeal of this girl-grows-up story is broader than that. “I think that anyone who’s left home for their first year of school can relate to the book.”

Currently, Fried is collaborating with illustrator Vesna Mostovac on a graphic novella. She admits that carving out opportunities to write can be challenging. “Unfortunately, I’m not very disciplined,” she laments. “I don’t think I do a good job of balancing work and writing. It would be easier if I was an insomniac, but I sleep a lot.”

The writing life is an uncertain one with no guarantees of success. After Crow Lake, Mary Lawson was approached to give a talk, to encourage other budding writers to stick to it by using her hard-won success as an inspiration.

Lawson didn’t think that would have been honest.

“I should have given up [after the initial flurry of rejections]. The only sensible reason to write is because you love writing.”