Pages of a curated love gone wrong

Tshepiso Madihlaba launched her debut novel, Maserati: A Love worth Finding at Melville-based book store, Book Circle Capital.

Though the book can be described as a contemporary romance, the author rather considers it to be a story of everyday people, that deals with universal themes, such as love, loss, heartbreak, friendships and second chances. “It also deals with the experiences we have in our formative years and how they shape the choices we make for our future,” she described.

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The book introduces its reader to the book’s protagonist as she reflects on a bad break-up. This was a love she thought would be a life long, but it turned out that she was in love with someone she did not know.

The author said the book speaks to how people can craft a narrative in their heads and how they paint this perfect image in their head and get to live out this imaginary life. This perfectly crafted life by the protagonist shows how while her focus was making sure her life was perfect, she instead missed out on her life as it happens. So she steps into this new life with a renewed sense of optimism.

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Even though Madihlaba had always written, she never described herself as a writer. She reflected on how children like her, raised in the 70s and 80s, if they showed the slightest interest in sciences, it was assumed they would go into that career. “When I was a young a six-years-old it was clear to me that I would become a doctor and so I became I doctor, but I had always been writing.” It was not until she got to high school, where she shared her writing through short stories with her classmates, who would then pass these around to others, and people really enjoyed them so it was then she thought. ‘Hey, maybe there is something here’.”

Now looking back on her childhood, she shares on how she lived in a world of ‘what if’s’. The author shared on how she would mostly write from this perspective as she conceptualised how different her life would be if certain things were not as they were. “I would think, if I lived in this imagined world, maybe it would it be like this. So I created characters that lived out what I thought would be the ideal life.”

From this book, she hopes readers will take away that we are each, all navigating a messy life, and that it is important to reflect on our lives so to avoid repeating cycles.

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