Getting your first novel published is like dating, says Rebecca O'Connell.

The 1990 Penn State alumna and newly-minted author compares those first rejections she received to guys she went out with before meeting her husband.

You just don't need to go there.

When a literary proposal finally called, O'Connell was speechless.

Two years ago this month, Stephen Roxburgh, president of Front Street Books, left an auspicious message on her answering machine.

"I called back right away," she writes of the day. "He asked me to tell him about the book. How had I written it? 'Well,' I said, 'I started it in . . . SQUEAK.' I couldn't continue. I was hyperventilating. 'You're hyperventilating,' said Stephen, 'Relax.' "

O'Connell told him she would get her thoughts down in a letter.

Since then, she calmed down enough to talk about the experience of having Roxburgh's company publish Myrtle of Willendorf, a coming-of-age novel released in August.

The title character, an overweight young woman with artistic aspirations, examines her identity and self-image, while navigating through the peer pressure of high school and college. Aimed at a teenage audience, O'Connell's book weaves dry humor into a narrative that addresses eating disorders and sexual orientation.

That synthesis struck Roxburgh when he read her manuscript.

"From the very first sentence, it was laugh-out-loud funny and it was serious — true comedy in the classical definition of the genre," the publisher says in an e-mail.

In the prologue, Myrtle finds herself at a pagan ceremony in her friend Margie's basement, worshipping an earth goddess. Margie takes out a tiny carved idol with "itty-bitty arms folded over enormous round breasts" and "a wide, round abdomen."

Sheila, a teenage mom, says: "Ha! That looks like me right before I had Jilly." Myrtle thinks, "That looks like me right now."

O'Connell says most of the book is not autobiographical, but she did take a non-credit course on ancient mythology and poetry called "Women's Mysteries" while at Penn State. In the first scene of Myrtle, she inserted a few details drawn from her memory of that free class, which was offered through a student group in the old HUB.

Growing up in Indiana, Pa., O'Connell enjoyed reading, a hobby partly inspired by her parents, both of whom are teachers.

In college, she studied psychology, most memorably with the late professor Paul Cornwell. "When I was younger, I liked the humanities and the sciences," she says, noting that her major allowed a mixture of the two.

After graduating in 1990, her interests turned to library science and she decided to attend graduate school at the University of Pittsburgh.

She now works — "just across the street" — at the Carnegie Library in Oakland.

It was there that she started writing more avidly and decided to join a writers' group led by accomplished author Sally Hobart Alexander.

O'Connell met biweekly with about a dozen other people to workshop her drafts.

"There's no doubt in my mind that when I heard her topic that she would get published," Alexander remembers.

But Myrtle was not completed without help from her fellow writers.

Alexander says O'Connell didn't write the novel in a chronological way; instead, she wrote passages on certain themes. The group guided her in organizing the text into a clear story-line and chapters.

Alexander thinks the workshop experience gave O'Connell some structure in more ways than one.

"It makes you write," she says. "She'd even stay up to 2 or 3 in the morning" to prepare her work for the next day's meeting.

From early drafts to final revision, the process took O'Connell about four years. The mostly favorable reviews she's read have made it worthwhile.

"Often witty and even more often provocative, this first novel is arresting despite its flaws. . . . It testifies to O'Connell's talents that she leaves readers wanting more, not less, of her oversized heroine," wrote Publishers Weekly.

The 32-year-old author says she has started writing again "in a wishy-washy way . . . but it hasn't jelled yet."

In the meantime, she plans to bring a different kind of creation into the world. She and her husband of nine years are expecting their first child in April.

But Roxburgh doesn't want his literary partnership with O'Connell to end up a one-book stand.

"I don't publish books, I publish authors," he says. "Rebecca is enormously talented and I intend to publish her for a long time."