Ruby Wax has written many books; this is the first I’ve read. I decided to read it because I’d seen from a two-line newspaper review that it was about Wax’s admission to an in-patient psychiatric hospital for a depressive episode, and was an account of her time there. I’m often interested in reading first-person accounts of this sort of thing, particularly as my experience in these settings has been entirely from the professional perspective, and it’s interesting to get the other perspective. Although fictional, Jasper Gibon’s The Octopus Man did this very well, and I enjoyed reading it back in February.

Unfortunately, this is only a small part of this book. The bulk of it is a collection of autobiographical anecdotes, many of which have no obvious connection with the mental health aspect. It’s a bit like a celebrity autobiography: a chunk of the book is a behind-the-scenes account of the making of a television documentary about Isabella Bird, there’s another chunk about working with refugees, and so on. This isn’t what I was expecting, and I’m not certain that I would have picked up the book if I’d understood the content to be so varied, but there were some interesting observations in there.

This didn’t inspire me to explore the back catalogue.