"I’ve been wanting to write for Summit Books, so I told the editor, Tara Sering, that I wanted to do something about the usual twentysomething dating scene," says Claire Betita. "The character I had in mind was a girl who has had no boyfriend since birth. Tara said, okay, let’s make that the title. The character was actually inspired by former NBSB officemates in their mid-twenties."
Claire had first heard of the term "NBSB" as a student at UP Diliman taking up journalism, a degree she finished with cum laude honors. She had a crush on a guy, and like all campus romances go, he didn’t pay attention to her. Luckily for Claire, he was applying for membership with the Journalism Club, a group she belonged to. At UP in those days, you could always spot an applicant to an org. One of the more embarrassing initiation rites was dressing up in ghoulish costumes and makeup, making lunchtime on campus a treat for students and a stomach-turning event for the poor applicants. Some organizations like the Journ Club gave more relevant tasks like writing papers and doing research. In a stroke of genius, the love-struck Claire asked the guy write a paper…about her.
"My mindset was that I didn’t want to wait for a guy to ask me out. I was a plain Jane and there were so many pretty girls around, so I created an opportunity for him to get to know me," she says with a giggle. "To do the write-up about me, he had to get to know me, siyempre that was my chance to charm him."
A little more than a decade later, Claire writes No Boyfriend Since Birth, the seventh offering of Summit Books published in July 2004. Summit recognized the huge local market for this genre of literature which started in the 1990s with the success of books such as Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones’ Diary and Marian Keyes’ Watermelon.
The chick lit books are all about singletons living in the city, independent women trying to find love. They’re light and humorous reading, except this time Bridget speaks a little Tagalog. While the language of the Summit novellas is primarily English, Filipino words are also used, making them more relatable for Filipino readers and a blast to read because, let’s face it, Tagalog expressions are funny and just can’t be translated (how do you say, "Wala lang" or "malay ko at paki ko" in English?).
Only five months after Claire’s book was published, she got a call from a local movie company that wanted to buy the movie rights of the book. For Claire, meeting with the producers and discussing how to turn her baby into a movie made the experience more surreal. When the book first came out, she noticed blogs discussing her characters as though they were real people, and received fan mail from teenagers, gay men and working women telling her how much they loved No Boyfriend Since Birth.
It’s easy to love Claire’s heroine – a 25-year-old smart and pretty junior marketing executive named Rudie Bermejo. At the start, Rudie’s passive attitude about her NBSB situation is annoying – she’s desperate to find a man, any man who’d be interested in her – but thankfully finds herself along the way.
"Di ba?" I cried emphatically. "True love! Soul mate! Travel mate! Chat mate! Syet talaga ‘tong buhay na ‘to! Lord, when will you send him to me?"
Actually, that’s how Claire talks in real life. She’s a funny, certified fashionista, but she denies the character is her. "We’re only similar in the sense that I could not separate it from my fashion background. I didn’t realize that I was inserting brand names and putting emphasis on makeup and hair color, which is part of my training in Preview and Cosmo magazines."
Rudie, of course, has to deal with colorful officemates every day as she is searching for love: Mike, the cute guy who irritates her as much as he attracts her, and Maris, the girl who simply irritates her.
"Is that lumpia?" Maris’ high-pitched, syrupy voice jolted me out of my reverie. "Can I just bite?"
The nerve of this girl! After hinting that we were such pigs for eating merienda.
Rudie’s transformation begins as she quits being a spectator and starts taking charge of her life and becomes a bit of an OC (should she abbreviate her text messages or not when asking an artist to have kofi with her?). She dates several men, which is what readers enjoyed the most – the whole dating game, the hits and misses (well, mostly misses). She dates a furniture designer who looks promising but ends up talking about nothing but his depression; a guy she meets at the MRT who ends up walking out on her (she did take 45 minutes to apply her makeup); loses her virginity to a friend that’s still hung up on his ex-girlfriend. And eventually ends up right where she started – but this time, she’s fine with it.
Claire says, "I’m not fond of happy endings. I could not bring myself to resolve everything just to make the character happy. It’s more fun to leave something to the imagination. Some people are asking me, ‘Ano’ng nangyari kay Rudie and Mike?" Hello? Totoong tao ba yon?"
For Claire, the feedback was totally unexpected. "A lot of the readers said they felt empowered, they liked the take-matters-into-your-own-hands attitude of the character. Now, they’re telling me they don’t have to wait for a guy to ask them out, or better yet they tell me they don’t have to have a boyfriend and that it’s okay to be NBSB."
In the real world, Claire has been telling women just that. Her articles for Cosmo are usually about issues on relationship, friendship and career. "Cosmo is more well-rounded; it’s not just about fashion. It’s more Pinoy and more real for me. I like the fact that it empowers the women who read it."
Claire wet her feet in publishing as a feature writer at Today under then lifestyle editor Abe Florendo. "A lot of the magazine work I do now I learned from my first job. That was the best training for me." After Today, she wrote speeches on economics and finance when she worked at the Asian Institute of Management, but she eventually went back to feature writing, first for Preview as managing editor and now for Cosmo.
Claire flirted early with writing. At Grade 4, she was writing in her journal (as of last count she has about 20 journals tucked somewhere in her house) and by the time she reached high school (she was a huge fan of Sweet Dreams books), she was writing short stories and binding these collections with fasteners to make them look like books.
"One day I still want to write an intense, non-chick lit book and it’s always been my dream to publish a collection of short stories," she says.
One thing readers might be surprised to learn about Claire is that this girl who writes so well about the life of the Filipino single woman is actually a happily married woman with a son.
"My husband never asked me whether the guys in the book are real or not. He’s very steady. I think he’s happy because I’m done with it and I don’t pester him anymore with my angst."
At least in the real world, happy endings aren’t just a dream.