Light Enough to Finish in a Day. Not Deep Enough to Answer: Why Am I Like This

Publisher: Kwela

Type: Novel

Genre: Fiction

Date Released: October 2025

Price: +/- R 290

Format: Paperback (256 pages)

Some stories find you when you need them. 

My dad has dementia, and because I live in a different city from him, I'm caring for him from a distance – the kind of quiet, constant worry that doesn't switch off. So when I attended Qaanitah Hunter's book launch for Why Am I Like This and realised her newest novel had similar themes to what I was going through, I knew I had to get my hands on it before I'd even left the room. 

Hunter, South Africa's hard-hitting political journalist and creator of The Debrief Network, is no stranger to writing fiction. 

Her first book, Diary of a Guji Girl, gained a cult following for the honest and humorous way it captured the life of a young South African Muslim woman – particularly how Amina, a first-year student from the small town of Newcastle in KwaZulu-Natal, navigates campus life, friendships, the pressure from family to marry, and all the unspoken rules of her culture and community. 

Diary of a Guji Girl was one of the first books where I saw my own world on the page. At the time, there weren't many stories out there about South African Muslim Gujarati women, written from inside that world with all its specific slang and traditions. There's also an easy, chatty quality to Qaanitah's writing that pulled me in. She doesn't try to sound literary; she just tells it like it is, and that's exactly why Diary of a Guji Girl and her other work are well-received.

Although Why Am I Like This is Hunter's second work of fiction, it is not her second book overall. She's also published several non-fiction titles on South African politics, including Who Will Rule South Africa? (co-authored by Adriaan Basson) and Eight Days In July: Inside The Zuma Unrest That Set South Africa Alight (co-authored by Kaveel Singh, Jeff Wicks). Considering all of this, I had high expectations for Hunter’s new novel.

Why am I Like This follows the story of Farah Nosipho Garda, a twenty-seven-year-old professional student whose life is going nowhere. 

She has no job. 

No future plans. 

Her love life could be described as a disaster zone. 

But when she learns of her adoptive mother’s dementia, she makes a decision to leave the comfort zone that she has built in Cape Town and move to her mother’s retirement village in Johannesburg to take care of her. 

She views this drastic change as another way to stall herself from the reality of her own life. But while caring for her mom, Farah then has to confront her own battle with depression and her constant self-loathing and self-image that has shaped her identity. Where her life, however, does get interesting is when she finds herself in a complicated, developing relationship with Zaid, a guy she meets on the flight to Cape Town. The novel is touted as a witty modern-day life story set in the age of Ozempic, therapy, and situationships. 

On paper, this novel covers a lot of heavy ground – a mother slowly lost to dementia, the grief that comes with that, and Farah's own struggles with body image and low self-esteem. You'd expect all of that to make for a hard, draining read. However, the story moves along quickly, and Hunter keeps things light enough that the difficult parts never drag you down the way you might brace yourself for, and I finished the whole thing in a day.

Farah is a really likeable main character, the kind you want to see win. She's funny, a whole lot of a mess, and easy to warm up to. There's also a bit of naïveté to her that comes from having lived a sheltered life, and it shows in the way she stumbles through things she probably should have figured out at that stage of one’s life. Her mix of charm and cluelessness is what makes her character feel real.

Although the developing romance between Farah and Zaid is there, it sits in the background. Hunter could have fleshed out the romance, as this would have been a more effective way to tap into South Africa’s rapidly growing romance genre. As readers, we don’t really get to know Zaid’s character. 

Hunter instead counters the lack of romance with Farah’s slow journey towards learning to show up for herself. Farah struggles with her body image throughout, and the novel reveals how this shapes the way she handles relationships, what she accepts from other people, and how much she believes she deserves. 

If I'm being honest about what didn't work for me, it mostly comes down to depth. The novel brings up some big themes like dementia, body image, grief, and existential crisis in your late twenties, but it tends to touch on these themes and then moves on instead of letting any of them fully play out.

I also wanted Farah's relationships with her mother and Zaid to carry more weight. A lot of the people around Farah felt more like background noise than actual contributing characters that I could connect with. And while I didn't want everything wrapped up neatly at the end, I did want to see Farah change in some way and come out of the story a bit different from how she started. 

Hunter had the foundation for a deeper, more moving novel, and if the storyline had perhaps slowed down and spent more time with the heavier moments, instead of just brushing past important issues, this novel would’ve hit a lot harder. 

Why am I like This is the kind of book you can sink into on a quiet weekend and finish in one sitting. 

It’s perfect for readers who prefer things on the lighter side of life.