Miranda Hart’s latest book is a self-help memoir charting the actor and writer’s journey to physical and psychological wellness through a chronic viral illness.
In my own search for health, wholeness, peace and meaning amid the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, I’ve done decades of counselling, therapy, healing, meditation and reading of self-help and spiritual books. With all the self-help that I’ve already done, could this comedian/actor’s book offer me anything further?
Undiagnosed for decades, Hart’s illness intensified to the point that she was bed- and housebound for most of ten years. She had to dig deep to come through. She took as her guides what she calls the “ists” – the many scientists, neuroscientists, therapists, psychologists, trauma specialists and sociologists whose work she’s absorbed and applied.
Hart’s dedication to the path of holistic healing initiated her into lived experience of the brain-body connection. She learned how to consciously reduce her body’s stress response using the many tools that she offers in this book, including the cultivation of joy.
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Gradually Hart’s vitality grew, and her muscular pain and flu-like symptoms subsided. She began a slow steady return – which included the reframing of setbacks as laybys instead of disasters – from the underworld, into life above ground. Aged 50, she found herself with a never-before-felt sense of physical wellbeing, purpose and peace, and a new awareness of what it meant to love and be loved.
The question is – did Hart’s book help? It did, even for a self-help veteran like me. I learned some new neuroplasticity science that encourages me to stay with the inner work that I do; and I was reminded of helpful healing tools that I’m long enough in the tooth to have forgotten.
Most importantly, people suffering from chronic fatigue-type illnesses could potentially benefit enormously from reading this book.
But the problem is that it’s way too long. Plus Hart’s aristocratic-British style of constantly addressing her readership as “My Dear Reader Chum” is irritating. Had a red pen been put through the author’s repetitive exclamations, unnecessary anecdotes and chummy asides – which she addresses to both the reader and to herself – the result would’ve been a much tighter, faster, more compelling read.
So if you go mining for this book’s treasures, expect frustration at its interminability.
