I HAVEN’T BEEN ENTIRELY HONEST WITH YOU by Miranda Hart (Michael Joseph £25, 448pp)
I haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You is available now from the Mail Bookshop
When Miranda Hart collapsed with debilitating exhaustion in front of her dog Peggy, her main concern was not ‘how do I get through the rest of my life?’ but ‘how do I get through the next ten minutes?’
The self-help industry had not given her this vital information, she felt. She needed to find out – not only for herself, but for all who encounter horrible setbacks and have no idea how to get through the next ten minutes. Programmed by our fast-paced world to seek success, money and happiness to justify our existence, we fall flat on our faces when something goes badly wrong. And for Miranda, something had gone terribly wrong.
From her teens onwards, she’d never felt completely well. For years, doctors told her she was merely suffering from ‘stress and anxiety’ and put her on antidepressants.
Having worked hard to achieve success as an actress, a job she loved, she was in denial about what was happening. It wasn’t until her collapse (some time in the mid- 2010s, when she vanished from our screens) that a doctor told her she’d been suffering from misdiagnosed Lyme disease for 33 years. She may have been infected by a tick in Virginia in the US aged 14.
She was bed-bound for months; it was ages until she even felt strong enough to sit up and do some Lego (one of her favourite pastimes; her dream is that Lego will one day design a Lego Miranda set.)
Taking us affectionately by the hand and calling us ‘MDRC’ (‘My Dear Reader Chum’), she takes us with her through what she calls the ‘cave’ of her ten-year journey to deep self-knowledge and recovery.
Along the way she picks up ‘treasures’ (nuggets of liberating truth), ‘smashes old patterns of behaviour’, and works out a code for how to live and what life’s priorities should be.
All a bit too earnest, from the Miranda we love and require to be funny? I wouldn’t want her to turn into a John Cleese figure, spouting endless psychological jargon. Thank goodness she can’t repress her inner ‘funniest girl in the dorm’ self for long in her prose.
Dream Team: Miranda Hart with co-star Sarah Hadland
Alongside her evangelistic self help fervour, and her sometimes rather soppy advice, such as to take time to look at a petal in the rain, she describes memorable escapades from her past. She recalls wearing bread rolls under her bra straps as shoulder pads in the 1980s and, while working in an office, weighing her bosoms in the post room to see how much they’d cost to mail.
Ever irrepressible and joyous after emerging from that dark ‘cave’ a healthier and happier person, Miranda pauses regularly for a vigorous dance round the room to a song that encapsulates the nugget of truth she’s discovered.
There’s Madonna’s Into The Groove, and Heigh-Ho from Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs (NB: not ‘it’s off to work we go’, but ‘it’s home from work we go’).
Very gradually, with a well-paced, drip-drip-drip of information, she lets on that not only has she found health and wellbeing, she has also, magically, found love.
First, the health and wellbeing. ‘Heavy revvies’ are what she calls the big revelations which come from her wide reading of authors she calls ‘the ists’ (experts and specialists), and her own experiences and thinking.
One is ‘stop fighting your body, and surrender to what it’s telling you’ (she admits this is one of the bravest things she’s ever done – even braver than abseiling down a Swiss Alp with Bear Grylls).
Others include: be kind and compassionate to yourself; guard against the trap of achievement; don’t forget to play and feel joy. These make your body lighten up and feel better, reminding your immune system not to panic; she wishes she’d learned this in school science instead of all the stuff about Bunsen burners.
Then there’s listen to how you yourself tick (a ‘party’ for Miranda now means ‘maximum ten friends and a dress code of pyjamas’); and be patient, letting life unfold how it does (when Peggy dies, she acquires a puppy called Patience – Patti – in honour of the patience she’s needed to get through her recovery).
One day, during the pandemic, an outbreak of mould was discovered at Miranda’s house, not conducive to health. So she had to move out and a mould man came to get rid of it.
Happy in love: At 51, Miranda found the love of her life
In what she first conveys as an unconnected incident, she meets a nice man whom she nicknames ‘The Boy’, who completely ‘gets’ who she is. The relief of this is incalculable.
On their first date, Miranda complained that her takeaway pizza had rucked up against the side of the box in an unattractive way, ruining it.
‘Being grumpy for a silly reason on a first date was completely new. And it FELT GREAT.’
On the second date, The Boy (who soon becomes ‘The Boy from Bristol’) made her cups of tea and they chatted for four hours, which felt like 20 minutes. An item came up on the news which made Miranda so annoyed that ‘I was pacing up and down with my full wingspan flapping like a gargantuan stork in front of a shy man pinned back firmly against the sofa, slightly alarmed’.
That didn’t put him off. A few dates later, he told her she looked beautiful. And, with her new-found self-compassion, she said ‘Thank you’, rather than the usual ‘you probably haven’t got your glasses on’.
And, reader, she married him!
It turns out that her husband, ‘The Boy from Bristol’, was the man who came to deal with the mould in her house. ‘The one and the very same. It’s not a high probability with a housebound illness and a global pandemic for a knight in shining armour to appear on the doorstep. But he did. To de-mould me.’
After all those years of illness, confusion and darkness, just married at the age of 51, she writes, ‘I have finally come home to my wild self.’
