BAMBOOZLED
★★★★
By MELINDA FERGUSON Melinda Ferguson Books
HER addiction took her to rock bottom. In H her memoir Smacked, Melinda Ferguson gave a harrowing account of how her craving for heroin and crack cocaine cost her almost everything as she landed up destitute on the streets of Hillbrow, Johannesburg.
This was followed by two sequels, Hooked and Crashed, which told how the mother of two managed to put her life together again and stay sober.
Why, after the hell she went through trying to beat her addiction, would she consider touching drugs again?
In Bamboozled, which continues Ferguson's story after about 16 years of sobriety, she's a successful publisher and in a fulfilling relationship, yet despite everything she still feels a gaping "hole in the soul" because while she's beaten her physical addiction, the psychological pain that drove her to drugs in the first place still remains.
"It often felt as if I was host to a bleeding ulcer, trapped in immovable pain and multitudes of character defects," she writes.
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