Our top three books for you to dip into this week
Does My Butt Look Big In This? You have to pick up a book with that title, don’t you! Felicity Hayward is a curve model, and founder of the online movement #SelfLoveBringsBeauty and in this book, she shows you, with great humour, how to take control of your own self-image and learn to love your true self. She’s a straight-talker, and brutally honest .. covering everything from toxic influences, facing up to the mean girls, fad diets, social media comparisons. There are playlists for energy, for quiet time, for self-love, and places where you can jot down notes in the self love manifesto chapter. Really great … can’t recommend it enough. Quercus
For most of her life, Chrysta Bilton was a member of a small, if somewhat dysfunctional, family of four. Her hedonistic, glamorous, gay mum struggled to keep the family afloat, while her father wandered in and out of their lives. When she was in her twenties, Chrysta found out that her father had been secretly donating his sperm every week for a decade. Suddenly her biological family included more than 35 siblings. A Normal Family opens with reunion, organised by Chrysta, of all the siblings (her one true sister, who she grew up with, is horrified). The memoir is in turn hysterical, moving, heart-breaking … and it reads better than a novel. Monoray
Writing a memoir can be brutal, says Melinda Ferguson. Adding not writing it can feel so much worse. Bamboozled isn’t her first book. She’d written Smacked, in which, she says, she had no issue in confessing she used drugs as a twice-pregnant mother and had traded sexual favours for crack. And Hooked, where she shared embarrassing information about her love addiction and the lengths she had gone to when stalking her then-boyfriends. And in Crushed – well, she tells of crashing a R3.2-million Ferrari, and how she managed to snap her lover’s dick after clumsy make-up sex. But when it came to Bamboozled … she faltered. She started it in 2017. Then stopped. Then 2020 saw her, along with the rest of us, obsessed with death. Covid. Curfews. Test. Quarantines. But last year, she went back to her notes. And the result is this book … an exploration of self, of looking for patterns and answers in a world gone mad, about freedom, and truth, and joy. About forgiveness and lockdown and how she sued the government for tobacco And about rescuing a dog, Joe, who ends up rescuing her. In search of joy in a world gone mad – it’s subtitled … and Melinda does her very best to do just that. Melinda Ferguson Books
All available from exclusivebooks.co.za
