Screaming with laughter
Katie Grant
HOW DO YOU WANT ME? by Ruby Wax Ebury, £17.99, pp. 320, ISBN 0091886627
If Ruby Wax's shrink thinks she has cured her, this book will put her right. Readers will be relieved to know that whilst supposedly marking her recovery from breakdown and nervous collapse, How Do You Want Me? displays our heroine still in splendidly neurotic form, pitching out the one-liners and lacing all personally sweet moments with arsenic so that no whiff of sentimentality or emotional weakness can be detected. Then she tries to get us to believe that, after a stint in the Priory with a. bunch of fellow kooks and a few twinkies (anorexics) followed by three days of solitude in a forest called Big Sur, 'the swords were finally lowered and my heart opened'. Oh, Ruby, I know what you mean, but when I read this line, my heart did not open, it sank. Luckily, with this sentence the book finishes. Why is it that when sharp, professional comedians start meditating or talking about the meaning of life, they inevitably sound phoney?
However whilst this book — an exposé rather than an autobiography — feels
slightly forced, due to Ruby's inability to write a line without trying to sharpen her wits on it, it is never false. How could it be? Just look at the photographs, particularly the one of the Wiener wagon and Lumpi the dog humping Ruby's father's leg, and you will see that, coming from a background like this, Ruby's formative years equipped her for only two things: the comedy circuit or the lunatic asylum.
She chose the former, although the latter still beckons. Far from showing how she freed herself from emotional sterility and the overriding impulse to push everything, from childhood pranks to getting married, into the realms of the surreal, How Do You Want Me? is the story of a woman still using her rapier talent to keep her demons at bay. After taking us on a romp through her blackly comic, bloody awful childhood, with a cast of characters to die for as material to use in later life, Ruby tries to tell us something about the nature of fame, how it eats you up and renders you insane. But her overriding concern is not to become a cliché — a beaten, belittled, betusked only child, whose obsessive vim 'n' venom mother excoriates her 'for your own good, V0000by' and whose father thinks she is only successful because the world has not yet realised she is a stupid bum. So the 'exposé' is truthful only up to a point. This book is really a stage performance through which Ruby will gauge, through our reaction, whether, if she quits being a performing seal, we will still like her.
And I did. At her best, when she is not too arch and selfconscious, when she allows herself to go with the flow instead of attacking us like a demented joke-machine, there are few people funnier than Ruby Wax. She is never going to be quite normal, but I can't help feeling that the best therapy would be to stop trying.
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