Bamboozled

​Title: Bamboozled – In search of joy in a world gone mad
Author: Melinda Ferguson
Publisher: MF – Melinda Ferguson Books
Reviewer: Hazel Makuzeni
From the successful publisher of more than 70 books and author of three bestsellers, comes ‘Bamboozled’. The latest memoir from Melinda Ferguson. A maverick storyteller who admits to being a shameless confessor at heart, most often with no filters.
This book has been a long time coming. She 

started writing it back in 2017 but then stopped. Unable to continue, she was gripped by the paralysing fear familiar to so many of us. The fear of what people might think and say about us when we expose our most inner terrors.
It was only in the second year of the Covid pandemic, in 2021, that she took the deep leap of faith and wrote on. ‘Bamboozled’ is a fascinating read about the author’s controversial spiritual pursuit to fix herself, to find freedom, forgiveness and joy in a troubled world.
Before reading it however, I was concerned that I might not get the full picture of Melinda’s life experience since I haven’t read her first book ‘Smacked’, nor the follow-up ‘Hooked’ and then ‘Crashed’. My worries were laid to rest as the book delves into her early childhood right up to her current state. And what a rollercoaster ride her life has been. It was at the tender age of four that she was introduced to vulnerability – her sense of safety shattered by her father’s sudden death. She will start drinking by the time she’s nine. “My childhood was steeped in alcohol,” she reveals. “After my father died, my mother took to the bottle.” For the author, alcohol was the gateway drug to heroin and crack cocaine.
During a seven-year insatiable drug binge she loses everything. Her two sons are taken away by her mother-in-law, her husband is gone, and so is her career as an actress and an award-winning filmmaker. She’s utterly broken, penniless and homeless in Hillbrow. For a fix, she steals, begs and whores.
The road to redemption that follows is a long and lonely one. Against all odds, she soldiered on the mammoth journey to life recovery – clutching at anything that would give her a sense of purpose. She was thrown a lifeline when the opportunity to write her debut memoir came along. In 2005 ‘Smacked’ was published, a runaway success which saw her parachuted to glory. In 2011, she went back to university and earned an Honours degree in Publishing with distinction. But all the accolades in the world do not fill the gaping hole in her heart.  Something profound was missing.
Then her world literally comes crashing down again after the near-fatal Ferrari car accident. She developed extreme PTSD and checked into a mental-health clinic for three weeks. It was during this time of disconnect and anxiousness that she stumbled across the healing effects of psilocybin mushrooms. In late March 2015, she embarked on her first mushroom ceremony in Monica’s Healing House. The experience is life-changing.
Then the Covid pandemic hits the globe and the world is left in disarray. On 15 March 2020, the president announces that South Africa is in a National State of Disaster. Even though she has been clean and sober for 20 years, she’s overwhelmed by “out-of-control panic.” “Overnight” she says “the virus has, like some psycho vacuum cleaner, sucked away all my inspiration.“ 
To escape the pandemic, she finds a piece of heaven nestled in the remote Matroosberg mountains. Her place of joy and freedom. But, as cruel fate would have it, a brutal murder changes everything. For crying out loud…. when will this woman find eternal peace I wonder? Are the gods forever scheming against her?
Two decades earlier, Melinda sold her soul to the devil that is crack and heroin. She was a one-woman tsunami destroying everything on her path.  In ‘Bamboozled’, she owns up to her self-destruction as she tackles her darkest fears. Confronting buried memories, childhood wounds, guilt and unresolved pain. Eventually she finds a loyal friend in Joe, the dog she rescued and who ends up being her liberator….but there’s so much more in this book. Read it with your seat belt firmly fastened.  ​