I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was: The Sunday Times Bestseller

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Iconic comedian Ruby Wax is making her way back to the stage and is set to tour the UK with her brand-new show I'm Not As Well As I Thought I Was later this year. Before I go, she wants to stress that the book was written “ Not because I had depression and needed to work my way out of it” but out of a post-pandemic concern that young people (and older) were missing a sense of purpose. Ruby will be 'pushing boundaries, and making her mark as one of the most important voices in mental health today'. We are going to use Complicité’ s lighting [the celebrated theatre company], and you will get taken on a journey.

Her friend the Rev Richard Coles had recommended – as a possible element for her book – that she visit a Christian brotherhood, the Community of the Resurrection in Mirfield (where he trained). Ruby Wax's acting and presenting career has spanned stage and screen, and her writing talent has created some of our favourite television comedies, from Girls on Top to Absolutely Fabulous. She admits to protecting herself from the news, although it comes reliably to her kitchen table (not least because her son is married to Katy Balls, political editor of the Spectator). Over six weeks in “a mental ward version of Fawlty Towers”, she is brought back from the brink and eventually discharged, armed with a fresh optimism. She is talking about Cast Away, a two-part series that just aired on Channel 5 which, on the face of it, sounds like a gimmick: she is stranded alone on an uninhabited island on the Indian Ocean seeking to discover what will be left of her once her “smiley, smiley” self is put aside.I did 15 minutes today, before you came, figuring I’ll be in a taxi later… going to get my teeth fixed…” But to sit still and find the “wise” adult who can calm her inner kid is challenging: “You really watch yourself: how agonising it is just to be in your own skin.

And it was during her stay there that depression (first diagnosed in the 90s) got its claws back into her. It is, I suddenly realise, the exact phrase she used in her groundbreaking interviews with celebrities on the BBC’s When Ruby Wax Met… in the 90s (she has interviewed everyone from Trump to Madonna to OJ Simpson).

With a Masters from Oxford in mindfulness-based Cognitive Therapy, Ruby is now also a mental health campaigner and author. Wax trained at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, got into the RSC and was coached in comedy, she has said, by her late, great friend, the actor Alan Rickman. I cracked my spine in three places, then did my show at the theatre… I wore a corset which not only made me look fabulous but the audience were: ‘Oh my God, look at her, she is standing! Later on she volunteers: “I don’t potter around or ever say, ‘I can’t wait to go and do some planting. As narrator, Wax is fluid and charismatic, drawing out both the dark humour and the bracing candour of her writing.

She admits that when she hears it, she is “enthralled because we are all animals and I want to know how bad it is. And when she describes making a documentary, Trailblazers, with Mel B, inspired by the Victorian adventurer Isabella Bird, she boldly climbs back on a horse even though, in 2019, she had a serious riding accident. But that is precisely why meditation is helpful: “I have to do 45 minutes every day – about four of us do it together on Zoom. And finally – she genuinely almost forgot to mention it (it really is too early in the morning) – she is doing a show based on her book.

In the Dominican Republic, she went swimming with humpback whales; she joined a Christian monastery; in Greece, she worked in a refugee camp; in California, she did a silent 30-day mindfulness retreat. She has a master’s degree in mindfulness-based cognitive therapy from Oxford, has written books about it, and has an OBE for her services to mental health.