I leave it for a few days and watch as the page views for my earlier posts start to climb and climb. The feminist blogger asks if she can feature me on her page. She sends me some questions by email, and I send the answers back the same day. She expresses surprise at my diligence. She doesn’t know I’m on a crusade, and that she is one of the horses I am riding into battle.

The next part is harder to write. I trip over those caveats that troubled me earlier—my awareness that fiction is fiction, and that everything is fair game to the writer. I stick to identity politics. As a man, Coetzee had no right to appropriate my story for his own ends. Fortunately, the political purpose that my story served in his novel is genuinely dubious. I have valid grounds for complaint.

It is bad enough that my rape was appropriated by a male writer, but he used it to construct an unsound messiah-redemption narrative for South Africa too.

I break the last part of my story into two parts—a description of how Coetzee misappropriated my story, and then how it garnered him fame, fortune and literary prizes. He waxed fat and successful. I shrank until my life became a tin of tuna and a blanket over my knees. It would wring the hardest of hearts. Clearly, his success was directly responsible for my failure. Cause and effect.

I decide to go international with this part of my story. The South African media is not big enough to contain the breadth and depth of my grievance. I tweet the literary magazines and the book-review sections of newspapers like The Guardian, the Independent, The Irish Times, and the Los Angeles Times. I tweet left-wing and feminist websites like Salon, Bitch Media, Jezebel, and the Daily Beast.

It’s at this point that I hit a wall. No retweets, no comments, no response whatsoever. The local media lapped up my story. The international media doesn’t care.

I manage to locate John Coetzee’s literary agent on Twitter.

She is a charming, fey creature in the Manic Pixie Dream Girl mould. She tweets full-length mirror selfies of her eccentric charity-shop outfits each morning. She recently acquired a photogenic kitten, named it George Michael, and created a troubled-rock-star persona for it.

I tweet her my blogs in chronological order with enquiring comments like, “Whose story is it to tell?” and “Monetising women’s pain?”

This gets under her skin because she retweets them with her own comments, like “Troubling . . .” and “Thought-provoking . . .”