There are certain things you learn growing up in a traditional South African family. How to greet everyone properly. How to behave when the aunties are watching. Which subjects are best avoided around the dinner table. How to smile, nod and keep certain parts of yourself tucked safely away.
And then there is Sunday lunch. That familiar gathering around a table, surrounded by people you love, while quietly navigating everything that can and cannot be said. The expectations. The questions. The opinions. The eternal concern about what people will say.
It is into this world that Prev Reddy drops Qualified Disappointment and I absolutely loved him for it.
Most of us know Prev through Aunty Shamilla, the wonderfully outrageous, gloriously opinionated character who seems to have walked straight out of every South African family gathering we have ever survived. She is hilarious because she is familiar. We recognise her. We know her. We may even have an Aunty Shamilla of our own.
But what surprised me most about this book is what happens when Aunty Shamilla steps out of the room.
Behind the character is Prev. The boy from Durban. The creative kid trying to figure out who he was. The son trying to make sense of family, culture and expectations while becoming increasingly aware that the person he was becoming didn’t necessarily fit neatly into the version of him everyone else had imagined.
And suddenly, the jokes hit differently. There were moments when I found myself laughing out loud, only to realise a page later that I had gone from laughing to feeling something far more tender. That, for me, is what makes Qualified Disappointment work so beautifully. Prev doesn’t use humour to hide the difficult stuff. He uses it to walk us towards it.
There is something incredibly brave about allowing people to see the person behind the persona. Especially when that persona has become so successful, so recognisable and so loved.
I know something about the comfort of a character. Whether you’re standing on a stage, creating an experience, writing something you hope will make people feel something or simply putting on a version of yourself for the world, there can be enormous safety in performance. You get to decide what people see.
Prev doesn’t give himself that luxury. He lets us see the awkward bits. The uncertainty. The hurt. The ridiculousness of family life. The moments when you desperately want to belong and simultaneously desperately want to be yourself.
Perhaps that is why so much of this book felt strangely familiar. His stories about family, community and growing up queer in a traditional environment made me laugh because they were funny – but they also made me wince because there is truth underneath the comedy. That particular South African experience of knowing that everyone has an opinion about your life, even when nobody has actually asked you how you’re doing.
The family WhatsApp group alone deserves its own award. Anyone who has ever watched a seemingly innocent family message turn into a full-blown interrogation will understand.
Then there is Prev’s ability to take something as ordinary as a braai, a family gathering or a conversation with a relative and somehow turn it into a tiny theatrical production. I found myself recognising people, situations and conversations that I have encountered in one form or another throughout my own life.
That’s the magic of Prev’s humour. It doesn’t simply make you laugh at something. It makes you laugh because, somewhere in the ridiculousness, you recognise yourself.
But underneath all the laughter is a much more beautiful story about finding the courage to become comfortable with who you are.
There is a particular sadness in spending years worrying about disappointing people who may never have truly understood you in the first place. We all carry some version of that fear. The fear of being too much. Too loud. Too different. Too ambitious. Too unconventional. Of somehow failing an invisible test that nobody ever actually gave us.
Prev understands that fear and rather than turning it into a lecture, he turns it into a story. A very funny, very honest, occasionally heartbreaking story.
Qualified Disappointment left me feeling lighter than I expected. Not because it ignores the difficult parts of growing up, but because it reminds us that we don’t have to remain trapped by them.
You can love where you come from and still choose a different path. You can love your family and still challenge the things they taught you. You can disappoint people and still turn out beautifully.
Perhaps most importantly, you can finally stop apologising for taking up space.
Prev may call himself a “qualified disappointment”, but there is absolutely nothing disappointing about this book.
It is warm, funny, honest and deeply South African. It made me laugh. It made me uncomfortable. It made me recognise things I hadn’t thought about in years. More than once, it made me put the book down for a moment and think, I know exactly what you mean.
To me that is when a memoir really succeeds. Not when you simply finish it knowing more about the person who wrote it, but when you finish it feeling that you know something a little more about yourself.
If you’ve ever sat around a Sunday lunch table carefully choosing your words, wondering whether you could ever really be yourself without disappointing everyone else, perhaps Prev Reddy has written this one for you.
I suspect you’ll laugh, you might wince and somewhere along the way, you might finally exhale.