Ruby Wax’s memoir opens in a psychiatric unit where she is undergoing transcranial magnetic stimulation, a treatment for depression delivered via a large headset that stimulates nerve cells in the brain. For Wax, “it feels like Woody Woodpecker and his cartoon pals are gangbanging in my head”. After 12 years of relative calm, the “Big Dip” had crept up and hit her hard. “Depression is the black hole of diseases, where you sit helpless as your mind hammers you with accusations,” she notes. “Your thoughts attack like little demons biting chunks of your brain. It’s hard to stay alive and listen.”
I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was recounts this spiral into mental illness, which began while she was researching a new book about her search for meaning and self-fulfilment. We follow Wax as she goes on a month-long silent retreat near San Francisco and volunteers at a refugee centre in Greece. While visiting a monastery in Yorkshire, she finds she can no longer contain the “typhoon of mental torture” blowing through her mind. And so she takes a train back to London for “my latest adventure. Not a journey to find meaning, but a journey towards a fully fledged breakdown.”
As narrator, Wax is fluid and charismatic, drawing out both the dark humour and the bracing candour of her writing. 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. As Wax tells her psychiatrist: “I thought it was all over at this point in my life, but [the] second half seems way more interesting than the first.”
• I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was is available via Penguin Audio, 6 hr 12min
Further listening
The Marriage Portrait
Maggie O’Farrell, Headline, 13hr 28min
Genevieve Gaunt reads O’Farrell’s novel set in Florence in the 1560s where the teenage Lucrezia, daughter of Cosimo de Medici, is forced into a marriage with her dead sister’s fiance.
Ghosted
Rosie Mullender, Hachette Audio, 10hr 38min
A young woman’s fury at being ghosted by a man she briefly dated is replaced by shock when she discovers he is, in fact, dead, and has returned to haunt her.
