I’m on the right path with my mental health but it turns out I was quite ill and didn’t know
Ruby on laughing with her kids and her traumatic past
Ruby Wax is the in the kitchen of her leafy west London home when P.S. catches up with her. The walls are lined with art and favourite photographs, candles top the mantelpiece, and somewhere on the floor above, her husband of 35 years – TV and film director/ producer Ed Bye – can be heard pottering around.
“Ed are you coming down?” she calls over her shoulder as she settles into a chair to chat, sun streaming in behind her from large, square-paned windows. His answer in the negative leaves us free to discuss her book, I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was (just out in paperback) and the new UK tour on which it is based.
On Sunday nights Ruby reveals that she and Ed – director of TV comedy drama Murder, They Hope, starring Sian Gibson and Johnny Vegas – look forward to having their children home. Max, 35, is a coder, Madeleine, 33, a producer/comedian and Marina, 30, an actor/comedian. They “order in” food, watch some TV, and laugh – a lot. “They are very funny,” she grins. “So, we get free entertainment.”
The children are, it seems, a chip off the maternal block. Comedian and actor Ruby was a stalwart of BBC output through the nineties – her series The Full Wax was followed by Ruby Wax Meets, and Ruby, and, after a gap of a year or two, The Ruby Wax Show in the early 2000s.
Ruby looks happy and excited as we Zoom-in for our interview and her home life seems practically perfect. But, she admits, it fills her with fear. Ruby is “a runner”.
The first time she ran, she was a teenager, headed for the UK and Scotland’s Royal Conservatoire, escaping violent parents back home in Chicago who had themselves fled the Nazis in Austria. She says she has not stopped running, only now she knows why. Returning
to her Glasgow stomping ground for the tour that carries the book’s title, the comedian who has bipolar disorder and suffers repeated bouts of depression, reveals: “I have a fear of being locked in and of being in a home. Any place that is called home I don’t like staying in, it gives me the creeps. Even my own home, I don’t like being in it.” After being ditched by the BBC when she hit 50, she’s now doing what she says she loves best – touring.
Ruby, who was awarded an OBE in 2015 for her work as a mental health campaigner, reveals: “I asked to come to Scotland. I said ‘I have to go back to Glasgow because it’s in my heart’. But I don’t know where anything is now. They rearranged everything, I guess to make it more beautiful, I can’t even find my old school. I liked the edginess of it before. Chicago and Glasgow are similar. It’s that dark sense of humour. That’s where I feel most at home.”
The 70-year-old star, who holds masters degrees from Oxford University and Regent University in London, discovered a long history of mental illness in her family and some insights into her parents’ behaviour when, in 2017, she appeared on the BBC’s genealogy show Who Do You
Think You Are? She reveals the original idea behind her 2023 sell-out tour and its extension into 2024 was based on “the extreme journeys that I wanted to take in order to find an antidote to living a frazzled life. Along the way, I wanted to find meaning, peace, happiness – the stuff we’re all chasing”.
But after 12 years of being depression-free, it suddenly hit again. “I didn’t expect it,” she admits, adding: “After some transcendent experiences, I ended up in a mental institution.”
But hers, she insists, isn’t a tale of woe. “It’s not really a book about mental illness, it’s not ‘here’s my homage’. I’m sent hundreds of books about mental illness, and I yawn. I’m using it for comedy and (to say to other sufferers of depression) ‘if you feel alone, you’re not’.
“I am running all the time in the book, from one big event to another and hilarious things are happening. I go on a 30-day silent retreat, swim with whales, help get people out of Afghanistan and sleep in a Christian monastery.
I do find enlightenment, but then I screw it up because I get corrupted by money or fame, or ego. I’m on the right path but
it turns out I was quite ill, and I didn’t know it.
“A very good shrink got me to a point where I realised what happened in my childhood, and it was bad. So, I also realised that I am never going to find home, because it’s not in my DNA.
“I’m a refugee and I will always run. But I am not running away now, I am running toward. It’s making peace with the fact that you’re a runner. To be aware is everything. I know why I run.”
Ruby revealed her traumatic childhood in August in a TV interview with Kate Garraway, telling how her parents “took the war from Europe and brought it to the kitchen” slinging “verbal grenades” at each other. “They were pretty violent with each other (and me), you’d have the sh** knocked out of you.” She relived how her father beat her up in front of her friends, who desperately tried to protect her.
“If I wouldn’t have gotten out of there, I would be dead. I have a long line of suicide on my dad’s side so it would have happened.”
Despite her history and struggles, she’s has a bond with her children and sustained a 35-year marriage with their father, who she met on the set of Girls On Top, the 1980s sitcom she wrote with Dawn French and Jennifer Saunders. We wonder how. “I found a guy who I knew was sane, I checked his records,” she grins. “His family are sane. They are from the military, from a long line of people who lived in the trenches and thought it was quite invigorating, so they’re very stable. I intentionally brought stable genes into my genetic code and so I had three normal children, well not normal, the comedian thing carried in.”
Maddy and Marina Bye have sold out three consecutive Edinburgh Fringe runs with their act Siblings. Max is married to Katy Balls, political editor of The Spectator. Do her kids take career advice from her? “I’m not allowed to even mention showbusiness because they don’t want to be influenced by me. The want to make it separately. So, they never mention me at all. I don’t blame them.”
Ruby, who spent five years with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is now concentrating on touring and writing. “I am getting ready to write another book and that will take me to extraordinary places,” she reveals. “I like travelling and I like to be surprised and that’s why I live like this.”
Where does she think she’ll be in 10 years’ time?
“I’ll probably be dead, so
I’d like to be alive. I’m not a Buddhist, I am not coming back, so I am going to enjoy every second of every day.”
I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was by Ruby Wax is published in paperback at £10.99 by Penguin Life. The I’m Not As Well As I Thought I Was live tour by Ruby Wax and Impatient Productions starts on May 1 and will be at The Gardyne Theatre, Broughty Ferry, Dundee, The Pavilion Theatre, Glasgow, and The Tivoli Aberdeen, on June 11, 12 & 13 respectively.
I wanted peace – the stuff we’re all chasing