Tebele Makhetha’s book chronicles her journey through motherhood, marriage and divorce, cancer and, above all, honest faith.
For years, Tebele Makhetha built the life she had planned. An attorney and senior corporate affairs executive, she had a successful career across law, business, policy and corporate leadership. She was ambitious, driven and, by her own admission, “the person who had a plan, and usually a plan for the plan”.
Then life stopped following the plan.
A breast cancer diagnosis, the later news that the disease had spread, the end of her marriage and uncertainty around her career forced Makhetha to confront questions that achievement and careful planning could not answer. Her memoir, I Choose Life, which launches at Exclusive Books in Sandton City on 8 October 2026, tells the story of what happened next. But Makhetha is clear that this is not simply a book about cancer.
“At some point I realised that if I told only the cancer story, I would actually be telling the smaller story,” she says. “The bigger story is about choosing to live when life looks nothing like the life you planned.”
Choosing hope; practising faith
Published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, I Choose Life explores Makhetha’s journey, from motherhood to marriage and divorce, friendship, career, fear, forgiveness, joy and starting again. Faith is a theme throughout, but rather than an assurance that everything will turn out as hoped, Makhetha’s faith is what helps her to face whatever life delivers, even when it’s nothing like she’d imagined.
“Sometimes choosing life is enormous. Other times it is almost embarrassingly ordinary,” she says. “There is a freedom in eventually understanding that I cannot control everything that happens to me, but I still have agency over how I meet it.”
Motherhood has given that choice particular urgency. Makhetha writes about deliberately making memories with her daughter rather than allowing fear about the future to consume the life they have now.
“Choosing life is not denying death, difficulty or disappointment. It is refusing to let the possibility of loss prevent you from fully inhabiting what is still here.”
Unpacking identity
Who are we when an identity we relied on changes? What happens when our plans collapse? How do we live with uncertainty? How do joy and grief coexist? And how do we begin again? They are questions Makhetha believes will resonate with anyone who has experienced the loss of a marriage, a job, a parent, a dream or simply the version of life they expected to have.
“So many of us have an internal blueprint,” she says. “By this age I will be married. I will have this career. My body will work this way. My children will do that. My finances will look like this. My life will unfold in this order. And then life happens.”
There is real grief in relinquishing that blueprint, she says, and the book does not attempt to minimise it. But letting go of one imagined future can also make room for another.
“I hope readers close the book believing that a changed life is not necessarily a lesser life,” says Makhetha. “I hope the reader finishes I Choose Life asking not, ‘How do I get my old life back?’ but perhaps, ‘What life is still available to me from here?’ And then I hope they choose it.”
I Choose Life by Tebele Makhetha will officially launch on 8 October 2026 at Exclusive Books, Sandton City. Published by Tracey McDonald Publishers, the memoir will be available from 5 October 2026 at all good bookstores nationwide and online, in print and e-book formats.
Book details
I Choose Life: A Journey of Faith, Healing, Motherhood and Choosing Hope Again
Publisher: Tracey McDonald Publishers
ISBN: 978-1-0471731-0-4
Format: Print and e-book
Available from: 5 October 2026
Available at: All good bookstores nationwide and online
