Sara-Jayne Makwala King opens up about being a mother and her mad bad love

If you were asked to describe Sara-Jayne Makwala King in four words the following adjectives would most likely come to mind: broadcaster, journalist, memoirist, mother.

The latter being the germination of her second memoir, Mad Bad Love (And How The Things We Love Can Nearly Kill Us), published by Melinda Ferguson Books. 

Makwala King gained prominence on the local literary scene with Killing Karoline (2019), a memoir chronicling her self-harm, depression, addiction and sense of otherness owing to her being born to a white woman and a black man in 1980s SA, and her biological mother's decision to sequester her in the UK.

Christened “Karoline”, Makwala King was adopted by a white middle-class family in Surrey and renamed Sarah-Jane, with Makwala King changing the spelling of her name as a means to reclaim her personhood.

Three years post-Karoline, Makwala King’s latest memoir details the experience of falling pregnant by her thought-to-be-recovered heroin addict partner, Enver.

Enver’s relapse compelled Makwala King to delve into her past, defined and dictated by trauma and addiction, which led to the penning of Mad Bad Love. 

An anecdote about author and interviewer is a near-necessary inclusion because I first met Makwala King in March 2019 at Woordfees, a Stellenbosch-based literary festival for “middle-aged boekliefhebbers”, as she notes in Mad Bad Love.

The significance attached to this date? Other than the absence of the former chain smoker lighting one skyf after the other, it also marks the day she found out she was pregnant with her daughter, aliased as “Zora” in her memoir.

“I know, right?! That was hilarious,” Makwala King laughs in her erudite British accent upon being reminded of said rendezvous. 

Talking to me on a dismal “spring” day at Cape Town’s Open Book Festival, commenting on Makwala King’s matching coral lipstick and nail polish (“Of course it wasn’t intentional,” she jests), is followed by a question pertaining to the title of Mad Bad Love. Did she have a working one in mind?

‘F.I.N.E.’: Not fine

“No,” comes the immediate response. “Oh. No, I’ve just lied. The first lie of the interview,” she laughs.

Makwala King discloses the working title “was so embarrassing”, yet turned out as a chapter title: “It was ‘F.I.N.E.’. Ef-eye-en-ee,” she phonetically spells out. 

The acronym stands for “[f**ked-up, insecure, neurotic and emotional, which is, like, a recovery thing,” she explains.

“It was my idea and [my publisher] Melinda [Ferguson] wasn’t that on board. The more I heard it, I wasn’t on board either and I hated it.”

Many arduous brainstorm sessions between author and publisher (“I wish I’d recorded some of the stuff we came up with. It was so embarrassing! We came to a point where we just said words; it was ludicrous.”) reached its denouement when Makwala King typed a line including the three immortal words “mad bad love”. 

“And literally, as I finished the sentence I messaged Melinda: ‘What about Mad Bad Love?’”

Ferguson's impassioned response? “‘I love it, I f**king love it’,” says Makwala King.

“And that was it. That was it,” she shrugs.

“I love it. I love it more than Killing Karoline,” (*cue bashful smile*).

Of Ferguson and the next fix

“Would anyone but Melinda have been able to publi-?”

“No.”

The immediate response comes without the question being completed. (Then you know ...)

“But not because of the motherhood thing. Because of the drug thing.”

Ferguson’s 2005 memoir Smacked recounts her years as heroin addict, and the ignominy she experienced as an absent and unsound mother owing to her drug dependency.  

“Apart from being my publisher, Melinda’s also a really good friend of mine. Of Enver, as well. She’s watched this book as a friend, not with a publisher’s eye.

“I never had to explain the chaos,” Makwala King reflects. 

“I would be talking to her totally as a friend and I would say ‘what about this?’, ‘what about that?’

“No. This book, definitely no. This book, more than Killing Karoline, even because I needed somebody who understood the chaos of addiction,” she stresses.

“I needed someone to understand what that is and rooted in and to not just go ‘Oh, you're both just ridiculous, just stop using and leave’. I needed somebody who was going to appreciate the nuance and complexity of what addiction is. Whether it is my co-dependency/love addiction or Enver’s heroin addiction. It could only ever have been Mel.”

‘I’m a bad mother because ...’

The opening sentences of the prologue of Mad Bad Love, ‘Confessions of a mad, bad mother’, reads as follows:

01:11am The Clinic - May 2019

I am a bad mother. I've always known I would be. I come from a place that insists that I could never have been anything else.

What’s Makwala King's response to these initial thoughts following the birth of her daughter and becoming a mother?

“The ‘I’m a bad mother’ in the context of that book was ‘I’m a bad mother because I’ve allowed myself to get into this situation’,” she explains, “whereas my ‘I’m a bad mother’ is every single other mother in the world.

“‘I’m a bad mother because I work too much’; ‘I’m a bad mother because I shouted at her for not putting on her shoes this morning’.

“I know that I’m not really a bad mother. I’m no worse than any other mother: I’m just a mother who’s doing her best. And parenting is really hard.”

Pseudonyms and shame

Makwala King’s employment of pseudonyms is one which deeply interests me and I’m curious whether “Enver” is possibly a play on — or anagram of — “Verne”, “nerve” or “never”?

“No,” comes the amazed response.

“That’s so deep, Mila. I’m not that deep,” she laughs.

“When I change names I literally go ‘right, his name is that. Pick a name with the same letter’. The same with my daughter, the same with everybody in Killing Karoline. Just so I know because sometimes I’ll be talking and refer to the pseudonym and I think ‘F**ck, who’s that?’”

As anonymous as Enver’s identity is to readers, as known his heroin dependency was to Makwala King, who earnestly writes about the blame she placed upon herself for not admitting to noticing his relapse.

“Yeah. I blame myself. A lot,” she sombrely relays.

“And that’s hard because the shame I felt around that was a lot. I write this in the book, in the moment where his addiction is coming out and that he’s relapsed and using. ‘Why didn’t you see it? You did see it,’” she says with rhetoric frustration.

“It’s an amalgam of all those things. 

“Once I was pregnant, to acknowledge that he was still using was too terrifying and a few people around me had said ‘I think he’s using’. And it was so unfathomable to me that he would do that while I was pregnant, I just wrote it off,” she admits.

“But, actually, if I look back now and obviously I’ve done a lot of looking back now,”

She pauses.

“It was really obvious. But again, it wasn’t obvious. He’s a very functional addict. 

“It was all of that, I think, which made it so difficult. And when we talk about functional addiction, I put myself there,” she acknowledges.

“My addiction never took me to gutters. I had jobs, all of that kind of stuff. He wasn’t working. He couldn’t hold down a job because he was a heroin addict. He’s also really good at lying. The reason he gave me for the salary not coming in, I believed him,” she says, shaking her head in dismay.

A prequel and a sequel: Contextualising the present with the past

Considering Mad Bad Love came to be with Makwala King discovering she’s pregnant, I ask whether a second memoir would have happened if she hadn’t become a mother. 

“No. No way. You know what I heard when you asked that, actually? Because so many of the events are linked, that leaving out,” she starts, interrupting herself with an introspective, “Would the book have happened if. Hmm.”

As she contemplates her answer, brow furrowed, I follow up with her comment on “leaving out” in light of Killing Karoline: throughout Mad Bad Love, Makwala King refers back to her past (as depicted in Killing Karoline), and takes an achronological approach to the portrayal of her life story.

What did she decide to include and/or exclude from Killing Karoline in Mad Bad Love, and why the non-linear narrative?

“It’s like a prequel and a sequel, this book. So much of where we all find ourselves today — me, Enver and my daughter — is because she exists. It’s a really difficult question to answer. I suspect I’ll probably still be on the merry-go-round. But the pregnancy and becoming a mother forced me to really look at my shit in a way that if I hadn’t got pregnant. Also how E****,” [she lets Enver’s real name slip, followed by a gasp and “You can’t write that. You can’t write that.”] 

“Enver’s, Enver’s,” she quickly corrects herself, “own process kind of happened. I don’t know. That’s a really good question, I can’t really answer that.”

Let’s take a step back to the Throwback Thursday content, I suggest.

Makwala King laughs before explaining she doesn’t do drafts and “the first writing I sent to Melinda started with The Killing Karoline stuff. And it is in there. I sent it to Mel, she was like ‘Er’,” Makwala King pulls a face.

“I was so destroyed. And I knew she was right. But I didn’t know how else to start it. So I ended up starting with the pregnancy. 

“I had to put in the throwback stuff to give a context. To give a context to the relationship. Because I start the book when I’m pregnant and then I found out Enver’s using. ‘Who is this person?’ ‘Who are you?’ ‘What's the context of this relationship?’,” she rhetorically poses.

“It’s a difficult one because I still am a bit concerned that the chronology was a bit confusing. But it was really the only way I could do it. Rather than just like [she imitates typing on the table] ‘I met Enver’ and then this happened.

“The chronology of that relationship, the back-and-forth of that relationship was crucial to include in Mad Bad Love.

“But then also my own experience, that’s why I call it a prequel and a sequel: it talks about what happened before Killing Karoline and it takes us after there. That I love,” she says with fervour.

“Because in any other book it would have been called Why You Are The Way You Are or The Body Keeps Score or What Happened to You? or Why You’re So Fucked-Up. Those are all titles this book could have been,” she joshes.

“The book isn’t really about two people who are in a relationship with a drug addiction. It’s about what motivates us, and unprocessed trauma, and how we become the people we become. That’s what's the book is about.”

Her powerful proclamation is followed by a sneeze, an apology for said sneeze, and rummaging in her handbag for a tissue.

“Sinuses. I’m telling you. I was on a flight to Jo’burg the other day and that f**ked me up.” 

Three satisfactory nose blows later and Makwala King is “I’m in. Go.”

The repairable lightness of reading

And I go: Has Enver read the book?

“He’s busy reading it.”

And? 

“He’s a broken man,” she cheekily grins. 

“My author copies arrived before the launch. I went out for dinner and I came home and he was in the garden and he was having a cigarette and he looked stricken. ‘What’s wrong? What's happened?’

“I’m on page 66,” came the despondent response.

“‘Well, buckle in, buddy, because it doesn’t get much easier’,” she exclaims.

“It’s a hard book if you’re not the person being written about,” Makwala King recognises.

“I’m not going to rush him to read it. It’s something he has to process. We haven’t really spoken about it.

“I had said to him while I was writing I could see it was going to be hard for him. It was always going to be hard. Being referred to in memoir is difficult because my perspective is different. He did say that it has given him insight which he didn’t have before. Which is really interesting to me because I was like, ‘But I’ve been telling you this stuff for ages’.

“It’s very different when you’re sitting in family therapy and we’d go, ‘You did this’,” she says in mock-chastisement, index finger wagging.

“But when you’ve got a book in front of you there’s no agenda: it’s just the words, it’s just someone’s lived experience. So yeah, he’s reading it now.”

As for Zora in time to come?

“If she wants to, I’d be totally happy for her to read it one day.

“I think, for me — and I just said this in a session now — it’s a love letter to her, really. It’s a love letter to her to explain who one of her parents is and the journey I’ve been on to minimise the shit she will get from me.

“I can’t guarantee it,” she admits.

“No parent can. If she does want to read it, she will see that I was committed to healing. For me, for her, for the family, for her children — if she has any.

“I think what’s important for me is if she ever does read it — and if she indicated she wanted to at some point, I’d pick an age which I feel will be appropriate — nothing in that book will come as a shock to her,” Makwala King adamantly states.

“This is not a book your kid can pick up at 15 and for the first time go, ‘My dad sold my Babygro for heroin’; ‘He walked out on us on Christmas Day’. That is not how she’s going to find that out,” she says of her full-disclosure resolution.

It is precisely the inclusion of disclosing that. Yes, Enver did sell Zora’s Babygro for heroin and, yes, Enver did walk out on the family on Christmas Day, which has led to Makwala King’s work being responded to with comments of,  ‘You’re so brave to write your story’.

“It’s actually really uncomfortable,” she says in response to such remarks.

“People say it with absolute kindness. It’s not that I’m ... ” she hesitates.

“I know what you’re saying. The black woman trope and ‘You’re so brave’ and ‘blah-blah-blah-blah’. I am uncomfortable because I think, again, the bad mother thing. ‘How can you call me brave if I made these f**king awful decisions?’ Also, I’m one person. I do this thing constantly where I'm like ‘So-and-so’s got it so much worse’. It is such an addict thing to do. Which is hurtful. I need to start making the effort. Rather than rolling my eyes, just say ‘Thank you’. It has been quite brave, I guess.”

Brothers and balloons

In our 2019 interview, I asked Makwala King what “family” means to her. 

Her response?

“Acceptance.”

“That still holds true,” she says of her initial response. 

Makwala King accidentally mentioned her biological dad’s real name during a Cape Talk slot which galvanised her myriad Twitter followers to engage in #DeepDives, resulting in her locating and reuniting with him.

Padre aside, she gained three siblings, with the following extract from Mad Bad Love I’m interested in her commenting on in relation to the concept of “family”:

I’m six weeks away from my due date and unpacking boxes of new crockery and cutlery at the new house when my phone rings. 

“Hello?”

“Hello, sis.”

It’s Thabiso, my brother. Technically, my half-brother, but since being reunited with my biological father and my three siblings almost two years ago, following the release of Killing Karoline, there's no “half” anything. They are my family. Thabiso and I have become so close, despite the years of siblinghood we’ve missed out on. 

“How’s it going?” he asks.

I want to say fine, I want to keep holding it together, but instead I slide down onto the floor of the kitchen of a house I don’t ever want to live in, and I cry. I cry until there’s nothing left and I’m just whimpering down the phone. 

“What can I do?” he says.

“Come,” I say. “Can you come and be with me when the baby’s born?’

“I can,” he says. And he does. Because that’s what family do. 

“I know, right?” Makwala King fondly and near-teary-eyed says of Thabiso referring to her as “sis”.

“And more than that, when I said ‘can you come?’ and he said ‘sure’. He flew down to Cape Town. That is such a special time in my life, hey,” she reminisces.

“It seems a really long time ago now. Not because of time but because of what’s happened. He was the person I called and I was just howling.

“To be able to say to your brother ‘can you come?’. I was a stranger to my mother at the time, Enver was using, I literally felt completely alone.

“And when he got on that plane, and he came and we sat and watched a TV show called Rap Battle or something. It was such a mad time. Family still is acceptance.

“Enver, regardless of what the future holds for us, he’s also going to be family because we have a daughter together. I had to come to an acceptance of him. Which is really hard. It’s really hard. But we muddle along,” she says with a slight shrug and brief smile.

Makwala King’s epilogue concludes with the celebration of Zora’s second birthday, and the bambina’s love of balloons. 

“Mama! Mama!” She sees the balloons and squeals. “Loons! Loons! Ma hold, Ma hold!”

Does Zora still love ’loons? 

Mama Makwala King rolls her eye in mock-exasperation.

“Obsessed. It’s her birthday coming up. She now understands the concept of birthday and parties. I asked her the other day ‘what colour balloons do you want?’ and ‘who do you want to invite to your party?’ She listed every single person we know, including her teacher and I was like ‘sure, I don't know how that’s going to work out’,” she lovingly jests.

Saffa-isms and skyfs

Back to the present: the former nicotine-habitué’s numerous references to swaai’ing gwaais has me wondering whether she subconsciously misses cyclic drags of fags.

“It’s really funny, actually. As I pulled up today there were two people outside smoking and the last time ... "

A ponderous pause follows.

“I just don’t think about it. I really don’t,” comes the post-pensive response.

“Occasionally I get a whiff and I go ‘oh, that’s nice’. I did an interview with John Maytham the other day and he was like ‘are you still not smoking?’ and I was like ‘yeah’. And it’s as ludicrous to me to say you’re still not drinking. I can’t. I can’t ever smoke again,” she resolutely shakes her head.

“That is what 15 years of recovery does to you. It tells you what you can do and there are some things you can’t do. And smoking is one of them. I will never be somebody who can have a cheeky [she mimics inhaling followed by a satisfied “mmh”] skyf.”

I commend the Isle-of-Pom-raised Makwala King on her inclusion of Saffa-isms in Mad Bad Love and how comfortably she can gooi SA slang.

“Thank you,” she bows her head.

 As for how much international audiences sukkel with Saffa-isms?

“I know, right?” she laughingly agrees.

“What do you mean ‘skyf’? What do you mean ‘mos’? But also Enver is Capetonian,” she adds of the Mzansi argot she had to include, “otherwise it’s not giving authenticity to who he is.”

The importance of recognising — and respecting — Enver's authenticity is followed by the Saffa aphorism of all Saffa aphorisms: “Shame.”

Makwala King has a panel discussion coming up, and as her coral-shaded fingernails rummage in her handbag for her phone, she mentions the catharsis which accompanied the completion of Mad Bad Love:

“F**k me, SJ. This is such an act of self-love.”

One time.