About me
Bookshop

Get new posts by email.

About me

I’ve been reading ‘I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was’ by Ruby Wax

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.

This post was filed under: Post-a-day 2023, What I've Been Reading, .

Recently published posts

A crisis of fact / 07 November 2024

Voting doesn’t solve everything / 06 November 2024

Winifred Carney / 05 November 2024

Sincere and true / 04 November 2024

Tick tock, McKee Clock / 03 November 2024

Apostrophe / 02 November 2024




Random posts from the archive





The content of this site is copyright protected by a Creative Commons License, with some rights reserved. All trademarks, images and logos remain the property of their respective owners. The accuracy of information on this site is in no way guaranteed. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author. No responsibility can be accepted for any loss or damage caused by reliance on the information provided by this site. Information about cookies and the handling of emails submitted for the 'new posts by email' service can be found in the privacy policy. This site uses affiliate links: if you buy something via a link on this site, I might get a small percentage in commission. Here's hoping.