Melinda Ferguson on freedom, joy, shrooms and a canine companion

Smacked? Tick. 

Hooked? Tick.

Crashed? Tick. 

Author, publisher and recovered addict Melinda Ferguson’s unholy trinity of adversity has reached its coda. 

Nonetheless, the odyssey of Ferguson’s intrinsic healing has continued, with her putting appendages to keyboard and penning her fourth memoir in September.  

Bamboozled: In search of joy in a world gone mad, published by her eponymous publishing house Melinda Ferguson Books, reflects on the post-traumatic stress disorder she experienced following her car crash (chronicled in 2007’s Crashed), the unexpected healing properties of psilocybin, pandemic sturm und drang, questioning The Truth  and, ultimately, finding joy in a world gone mad.

The title could have read The Four Ses of Shangri-La: Shrooms, Soul-Mat, Sons and a Stray, for it is magic mushrooms, her eternal inamorato, two children and a lifechanging canine we have to thank for both the genesis of Bamboozled and the anecdote to Ferguson’s near-Sisyphean task of staying sane inside insanity. 

The born-and-bred-Joburger exchanged her Heimat for the Mother City and it is in the literary maws of Cape Town’s city bowl (the Homecoming Centre, where the annual Open Book Festival is taking place after a two-year hiatus) where we find ourselves at a tafeltjie away from the hub-hub of fezzie-goers. 

Connected? Too f**king cheesy

“The book was always Bamboozled,” Ferguson starts in her Jozi cadence before remembering that with the book’s provenance (which she started conceptualising in 2017) she had called it Connected.

“So I had Smacked, Hooked, Crashed, Connected. Then I started thinking ‘this sounds f**king cheesy’ and too ‘woohoohoo’,” the University of Cape Town drama department alum relays in a la-di-dah accent. 

“As we went into lockdown and I started questioning and going ‘what the f**k is happening?’ Bamboozled was, like, ‘okay, this is it’.”

As for the subtitle? (Ferguson nods in agreement when I mention her penchant for the inclusion of second appellations). 

“Initially my subtitle was In search of joy and freedom in a world gone mad. Then I cut the ‘freedom’ because I thought ‘Ag, during the time even the concept of freedom was very provocative’.” (The time being the advent of Covid-19 and the subsequent regulations which ensued).

Ferguson was vocal about her denouncement of lockdown and vaccinations and took to social media to share her weltanschauung on the pandemic.

“If you said things like ‘I want to be free’ people would go ‘you Nazi, you Trumpist, you f**king QAnon person’. There was such division among people that even the word ‘freedom’ was loaded with connotations that no-one had been aware of before. So I dropped ‘freedom’ and I thought just ‘in a world gone mad’. And in the end it was a search for joy,” she says  of the cathartic writing experience.

Ferguson’s author's note opens with the following dictionary entry:

Bamboozled (definition): to deceive, to hoodwink, to mystify. 

Was she intentional about the inclusion of the description à la the Queen’s English?

“Mmh,”  Ferguson responds in the affirmative, her answer redolent of the sound one makes when relishing palatable nosh.

“I didn’t just want the book to be about deception. I wanted also the idea of the-magician-bamboozles-the-crowd and therefore there is a magic and a mystification. 

“Because the book is not just about being deceived, it's also about being mystified and reawakened. And, in a way, magic,” she says, her eyes all-a glitter, “since for me one of the biggest themes in the book is the magic of life, of transformation, of how things can change within a second, my work with the frickin’ mushrooms.

“Also about life and human beings being able to actually transmute things like fear and pain and anxiety into wonderment and excitement and joy. I wanted people to not think it was ‘about being deceived’,” she lampoons.

“It says ‘hey, people: listen’. Because a lot of people don’t know ‘bamboozled’ is to be mystified.”

Transmutation of disaster

Compared to Smacked, Bamboozled takes a far more recent look at Ferguson’s life, which reminds me of Sisonke Msimang’s advice for her memoir students: Write from your scars, not your wounds.

Does Msimang’s advice resonate with the writer-cum-publisher of memoir? 

“I make those same suggestions to my writing people because I facilitate a lot of writing courses. I think there’s something very resolved when people have the ability to step back but sometimes you don’t have the luxury of a wound being a scar.

“On some levels — in some way — the book is a retelling of Smacked. A homecoming from Smacked. And that definitely for me was working with scars. And I think the level of depth I managed to engage with in terms of the addiction journey came from that place. 

“While part three, which is dealing with a very present unravelling of the world, is coming a lot from anxiety and wound.”

Ferguson finds it “quite interesting” to play with both, adding she doesn’t believe people have perfect recoveries. She also urges those writing about processing trauma not to wait: “Sometimes, if you wait for the scar, you’ll be f**king dead by the time you write it.”

Ferguson’s recommendation to her memoir students (“write as if the world is dead”) enters a different space in light of her youngest son Dan reading Smacked for the first time. I ask if her perception about this adage shifted after Dan told her he had read the book.

“In one way, yes. In another way ‘oh my God, my son is actually reading those terrible confessions I make as an addicted mother, as a mother who is trying to contemplate abortion, as a mother who is using drugs during her two pregnancies, as a mother who is going, each day, ‘I want to kill myself and I have to give birth to a baby’.

“Initially it horrified me.”

Time for The Big But.

Ferguson wags her right index finger, eyes widened, eyebrows arched.

“But I also believe his journey is to know the truth and what happened, happened. I’m quite grateful because of the way he’s taken it. And I have to tell you, Dan is in Amsterdam at the moment. He’s studying a masters in bloody computer sciences and big data engineering, which kind of puts to bed the idea of using drugs during pregnancy because my son’s got a genius brain,” she grins.

“But what he is doing as well is stand-up comedy. And what he really seems to focus on is his identity as a child who was born to addicts.

“He sent me a clip the other day and he has this wonderful routine where he goes, ‘The first time I took ecstasy was in Amsterdam. Oh no. The first time I took ecstasy was in my mother’s second trimester’,” she laughs.

“Now that is hardcore. I’m like, ‘dude. That is so hardcore’. I phoned him after I saw it and I said, ‘this is what you need to actually exploit’. Which other comedian can say I have two junkie parents? ‘You’ve got your own niche now’.

“So he's getting the audience to shout ‘crack baby! Crack baby’ when he walks on the stage” she laughs.

“Ja, so maybe he’s inherited my ... I hope this is what I do because this is what I aim to do, is to make disasters become your best friend. And that’s how I've survived having a lot of disasters in my life. To actually transmute the disaster into either art or fu**ing surviving and then sit there on top of the experience and...”

Ferguson leans back, middle fingers raised, her expression victorious.

“‘Hello, motherfu**er, I’ve got you, You’re not taking me down’.' And now he’s doing it and I think he’s inherited this attitude his mother has and he wouldn’t have maybe been the same person if he hadn’t had read what I did. So I still believe ‘write as if the world is dead’.”

A tale of two stories

Ferguson often draws on her past as a heroin addict and Bamboozled is interspersed with extracts from Smacked.

Did she deliberately decide on referring back to her former life?

“You know, I didn't want to at all. But I found that as I was trying to tell my story it felt like I didn’t have context.”

She pauses.

“How was I going to get context? And that’s the thing with memoir. Memoir is always telling the same story over and over again but in different ways. 

“I did worry that people who had read Smacked would go ‘hmm, I did read that’ or ‘I know about that’. But I also thought — for a whole new audience — one of my editors hadn’t read Smacked and kept going ‘I’m so glad you put that stuff in because I wouldn’t have understood’. So it was a fine balance. But it seemed to almost write itself. I didn’t really have control over it.

“When Dan said ‘I read about how you tried to have an abortion’, it feels almost rude not to say ‘this is what he read’. So that was very specific. I needed to almost word-for-word quote, and I do that at times in the book.

"But my work, as well with my psychedelic healing work, has so much to do with the journey of addiction. The thing is, I don’t think addicts easily heal. Especially if you go really deep into things like heroin, crack, where you’re on the streets, where you get gang-raped, all the things which I did which really broke my soul, broke my body. To actually heal from that, to do conventional, talking therapy is very difficult.

"And that has been a very recent awareness of How. Fu**ing. Damaged. I still am,” she heavily relays.

“I still have a long journey to walk in terms of the undoing.”

A trip by any other name 

The dread Ferguson experienced on the first night of her taking mushrooms — in a controlled environment —  (extracted here) is tangible:

“I mean, Mila, to describe the terror I experienced on that night that I sat in the room thinking ‘Oh, f**k. I’m about to jeopardise my whole recovery’. I'm the poster kid. Everyone’s read Smacked, everyone respects me,” she exclaims.

“Because I'm clean and sober and now I’m maybe going to take something that’s completely going to obliterate my credibility. It was a big thing for me. 

“But nevertheless, I went and did it. And I have to say that after that night I knew one million percent that what I’d ingested was not a drug. That what I’ve ingested was a teacher and the journey I went on was nothing that resembled any other proper, conventional drug I used.

“And the biggest sign for me that told me I had not erred, or faulted, or fallen — let’s call it fallen — there wasn't a single fibre in my being that wanted more the next day. I was full, full beyond anything I’d ever experienced. Literally full. My body, my soul had changed into a place of alrightness.

“And it wasn’t like one of those drug experiences where you go ‘Oh, I’m alright’ and the next day you’re like ‘where the f**k is more?’. Because of the deep kind of pain I had to face and the destruction and the pain I’ve caused others, the last thing you want to do, after going through something like that, is having anything else. 

“There’s no other drug — maybe ayahuasca.”

Has she considered it? 

“I would,” she concedes.

“I’m not being completely honest here. Let me just rephrase that: I’ve done, did try ayahuasca once because I was told ... I just didn’t,." she searches for the correct phrasing.

“I vomited the entire time. For seven hours, I just puked. And I said ‘never in this world again’.

“The mushrooms, for me, had been gentle on a spirit level but they’ve been the things that have really helped me with dealing with things I didn’t even know existed." 

Psilocybin and Soul-Mat

“Oh, my Soul-Mat,” Ferguson fondly says when I mention the influence her partner, Mat, has had on her life and fungi voyage. 

We are unanimous in her decision to capitalise the "M" in "Mat" to avoid the spelling (sans upper-case "M") resembling a typo.

“I first called him Soulmat, one word, but then I thought ‘no, we've got to make him Soul-Mat. Because his name is Mat. And I mean Soul-Mat has had a profound effect and influence on my life.”

This veneration is attributed to his vocation (psychiatrist), star sign (Virgo) and him being “the most genuine, honest, earthbound, ethical person I know.

“I'm, like, ‘what are you doing with me because I’m such a f**king deviant’,” she laughs.

“I think it was also his reassurance, on a doctor level, on a psychiatric level, because he had done so much research about what psilocybin does and it gave me the courage to take it.

“And now my capacity to work, to think, to create has changed on a profound level. You can see my productivity. And I don’t get tired,” Ferguson says of her post-psilocybin transformation.

“I am manic, I know. I am a manic person. But it seems like the psilocybin has opened my brain in order to take more, and be able to — I mean when you say ‘multitasking’ — I don’t even think that word is, like, multi, multi-something,” she laughs.

“I’m able to work tirelessly with a renewable energy and living my wildest dreams I could have imagined. 

“The only thing which could kind of come close to this is cocaine. It gives you this kind of false energy.

“This is a different type of thing. It’s expansive. I’m not telling people to take it: I literally say ‘do what you must’. I’m also very clear about psychiatric meds. I don’t tell anyone to do the same. Some people need it and it helps stabilise everything. For me, they didn’t work. Sometimes people say you need, like, valium or something, just ‘'calm the f**k down’,” she says with a self-deprecating eye-roll.

“But I know I’m younger — in terms of my brain — than I’ve ever been before. My brain is on fire.”

Recovery: A revolution

As for the fear of relapsing? 

“I was worried about that. In terms of some people who might say  (she imitates an oafish voice) ‘she’s fallen’. I'm sure that’ll happen. I’m almost prepared for that. In the conventional tradition, in 12-step programmes, there is a rule that says ‘no mind-altering substances’.

“"I have been working with psilocybin, which is mind-altering.

“I know I’m clean and sober. I’ve had 23 years of sobriety and I’m very certain about it. And I do also — and I have to say this and you’ve probably read this — just before I sent the book to print, I had the most amazing 12-step programme for people who are working with psilocybins, and that has also changed so much for me. I’ve got groups. They’re all online, most of them are in America, in Australia.

“It’s a new arm of 12-step recovery and there is no guilt, no shame that we are using ayahuasca, or psilocybin, some people are using MDMA in a therapeutic form, and they get better.

“I think there’s a revolution happening in recovery. I feel very, very excited that the timing of my confession comes along at the same time as that Netflix doccie  How To Change Your Mind. It has entered the mainstream. Things are being legalised. I don't do cannabis, cannabis is for me an absolute no-no. I haven’t had a joint for 23 years. I will not smoke cannabis because cannabis was a very addictive drug for me. But cannabis is legal in South Africa now and there are steps being taken to having psilocybin legalised in the same way as cannabis.

“I’ve been invited to speak at the Shroom Expo in November and it is part of the cannabis expo in Joburg. I’m, like ‘how the f** did this happen?’.

“I think it’s exciting to be alive as a recovering addict right now because we’re not as forced to stay in boxes as we were before.”

2022: A bleak new world

Fiction converges with reality as Ferguson illustrates the totalitarianism and dystopia she has come to associate modern-day society with via many quotes from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s A Brave New World.

“Hmm. A lot of Orwell, hey?” she eagerly nods.

“I would have had more but I didn’t get rights for some of them. I had to rely on certain rights that were available and asked for Carl Sagan — his bamboozled quote — and it would have cost me $8,000. I’m not even going to make that on the book.”

Ferguson draws on the deceptive definition of her book’s title to spew vitriol about the cause behind the bleak new world in which we find ourselves.

“I think if we’ve been bamboozled in the negative sense, in deception, it’s there with the big United States of Hypocritical America. I cannot over-emphasise how disappointed and angry I am with what that country has done to our planet.

“It has exploited, used, lied, abused, created war and mixed up the heroes and the criminals,” she vehemently states.

The self-proclaimed “big time Assangist” decries how Julian Assange, “who exposed war crimes and showed the world we’re entitled to the truth” has “been made the enemy and f**ked over with false accusations of sexual deviancy.

“Assange should make all of us terrified at the lies this country is able to spin. What we’ve basically done with Assange, it has warned us, ‘you f**k with our crimes, you will be punished’. Noone can avoid the message there that says the truth shall not be spoken.

“I do bring up the Twin Towers, all the conventional conspiracy theories. I don’t know what the f**k happened with the Twin Towers. All I know is America used that terrible tragedy as an excuse to go to war in Iraq and Afghanistan and killed many people and lied and when Assange said ‘look at the Iraq War, look at what people are doing’, he’s basically been sitting in prison and rotting. He is literally going to die.

“What I would love people to do, if they had read my book, is basically to start opening their eyes and realise the truth is actually not what we’re being told.”

Fox Mulder would be proud, Mel. 

A room of one’s own

Assange “rotting away” in prison is intrinsically linked to the numerous references to rooms scattered throughout Bamboozled, including Ferguson comparing her house to a cell during lockdown.

“I love that you picked that up, because in many ways the book is kind of almost on a loose structure about the rooms I’ve lived in. Even if I’m talking about the other characters, like Assange, I’m trying to create the Ecuadorian Embassy, I try to create the spaces. Rooms have an amazing way to capture experience because it is within rooms that we live our lives. I do that a lot in the book. I think there’s a movement towards freedom.”

Ferguson’s movement includes metaphorising her mother’s house, equating it to a prison (“the prison of growing up in a family with alcohol”), the movement to hotels “with the dealers and the hookers” to “the slow building-up of an addict into my first flat across the road from Love Books”, she says of the Melville apartment block where she lived “at the very beginning of my recovery”. 

Ferguson’s “slow building-up of my real estate” culminated in her buying a “heavenly cabin” in the Western Cape.

Yet a neighbour's homicide shook her.

“Then the woman is murdered in her room.

“It’s a hectic thing. There’s this marrying of rooms, but also what happens in the expectation of life and how that doesn’t somehow always work out,” she cogitates.

“I’m becoming more and more grateful for lockdown because lockdown forced us to, in a way, take a journey within. It certainly did for me: to confront things I’ve never had the opportunity to confront. I would never be thinking of America in the same way, of Assange, what would freedom mean? What would truth mean? What would imprisonment and authoritarianism and tyranny mean?”

Ferguson draws on the following passage from acclaimed author Arundathi Roy’s Financial Times article (“The pandemic is a portal”) to illustrate the “new f**king hope we have been gifted”: Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

“That we choose whether we’re going to take the carcasses of the past or walking forward. I am in a place of great new hope now. Because I’m not going to allow the power of  any f**king government to tell me what I’m allowed to do and what I’m allowed to think.”

Gwaai d’Arc

Speaking of governments: I ask Ferguson how much she spent on illicit gwaais during the cigarette ban.

“I’m going to tell you a little secret. I went and sued the government for tobacco and one tobacconist who was aware of the case — I won’t mention his name because he was committing a crime — reached out to me and my first stash he gave for free.

“I couldn’t really tell anyone. I was very lucky to have a proper stash of tobacco. Most people were spending. It was worse than cocaine. Look how much money was wasted! Speaking of the tobacco case, I am so proud of myself that I went and I f**king said ‘I’ll join’. For me, that whole idea of torture freedom, I was in my own way the Joan of Arc of tobacco and the f**king Statue of Liberty.”

Ferguson shares the following anecdote, which she didn’t write about in the book, pertaining to liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberté, égwaailité, flameternité, if you’d like):

“One night, I had a journey on my own. In my journey afterwards I sat on the balcony, in the dark, with my cigarette and this cigarette became like the torch of liberty and it grew like a flame and I actually thought ‘This is a sign, it’s telling me to keep marching forward in liberty’.”

Vers l'avant!

Joe, or How a Mutt Forced Me to Look at the Wounds of Motherhood

If Bamboozled were a novel, Ferguson’s adopted brak Joe would be the male protagonist. 

“Joe changed everything. I’m sure you’ve picked it up, but Joe forced me to look at the wounds of motherhood. He was this little puppy I rescued. He was found in a rubbish dump. Me being able to look after him, in a proper motherly way, made me realise what a shit mother I’d been as a drug addict.

“I’ve been so full of shame. ‘Where’s more?’ ‘Where can I score?’ I had to really look at all that had happened. That was, in a weird way, how the retelling of Smacked happened. It’s not this rose-tinted ‘the boys are reunited and we have this all together’. 

“In this book I admit I didn’t stop using because I didn’t want to. That was a huge thing for me to admit because I, in a weird way, had excuses. ‘I didn’t stop because my mother took my babies’, ‘I was so upset'’.

“The basic fact is that at a time in my life, the drugs were more important to me than my children. That is a terribly hard admission to make but it also tells the reader, I guess, how huge the hunger of addiction is and how it takes no prisoners. It will obliterate maternal instinct in a second because the monster is bigger than anything.

“It was kind of like a weird, painful thing to be mothering Joe but also I was so grateful to be given a second chance. To look after a puppy —  he wasn’t my son but he became my child — and now I land up saying in the book I thought I had rescued Joe but Joe had rescued me.

“He is a constant reminder of how he rescues me every day.”

She feigns wiping away a tear (doth I detect a hint of a real one?), exhales, and says “F**k, he adores me”.

“It took me so long to be a proper mom but at least I’m having the moment now. It is too late with my boys. I can’t re-mother them back to six months old. Joe makes me believe I am a good person because for so long I carried this shame of ‘you f**ked up as a mother.

“I hope you cut at least 20% of my f**ks,” Ferguson laughs, sharing that Mat counted the f**ks in the original manuscript.

How many were there? 

“A lot.

“I deleted at least half the f**ks. It was an overflowing of f**ks. There were times when I wrote lines ‘f**k, f**k, f**k, f**k’.  F**k is a great word.”

Joy: Melinda’s meaning

As the concept of joy is prevelant throughout Bamboozled, I ask Ferguson what joy means to her.

“I think joy and freedom are interchangeable, and because freedom is so important, freedom brings me joy. I would say joy is another word for freedom. Even though I didn't use ^‘freedom’ in my subtitle it was implicit. 

“Joy is a three-letter word, one syllable, it elicits a feeling of absolute lightness, excitement.

Ferguson's face lights up, she throws her hands in the air, and hollers “Freedom!”

“It’s a beautiful word. It’s so expressive in its smallness, in its one syllableness. My first son James’ second name is Oscar and his surname is Yazbek and it’s an acronym for ‘joy’. When my first son was born we wanted to call him Joy because despite us being these broken addicts, he brought us such joy when we looked at him.

“Often when we think of the two parents being addicts and trying to have a child, it wasn’t all terrible. There were times that we really just loved. Addicts are human beings who have fallen into a trap of need.

“Addicts are humans who struggle like everybody else and I know there were times, when we had our first son, before things really got dark, where we’d sit and stare at him with such joy and then we were withdrawing and we needed a hit.

“But there was so much shade between.”

I tell her our interview has reached its denouement. 

“Jesus, that’s a lot. Do you have to transcribe everything?”

Indeed, Melinda.

Indeed.