Posts From Author: ruby wax

No Satisfaction

No Satisfaction was a Seriously Entertaining presentation by the House of SpeakEasy at City Winery NYC on Monday, November 17, 2014. It featured the writing and speaking talents of Ruby Wax, Philip Gourevitch, Hooman Majd, Hari Dhillon (who posed this month’s “Tip of My Tongue” quizzers), Christopher Mason, Graham Moore, and Dan Povenmire. “About seven years ago, they asked me if I’d be the poster girl for mental illness,” said Ruby Wax in the opening minutes of the final House of SpeakEasy show of 2014. “I thought it would be a tiny picture… but a month later, there were huge pictures of me all over London.” Ruby, an American comedian who has achieved great success as a comedian in the UK, was in the US for the publication of her latest book, Sane New World: A User’s Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind. “So I wrote a show,” she continued, “and toured it in mental institutions for two years. I think they liked it. The bipolars used to say, ‘I laughed, I cried…’ These people are my tribe. Because I have serious depression.” Ruby shared a series of revelations with an enthusiastic SpeakEasy crowd. People are out of control, she said, […]
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Curtain Call: No Satisfaction

The lanterns have been trimmed, our log pile has been replenished, and there’s a splendid bottle of red glinting in the firelight. Yep, it’s time for another Seriously Entertaining foray into the best of contemporary writing. The House of SpeakEasy’s next show, No Satisfaction, which hits the City Winery stage on Monday, November 17, aims to provide the exact opposite of what it says on the tin. And we couldn’t be more delighted to welcome Philip Gourevitch, Hooman Majd, Graham Moore, Dan Povenmire and Ruby Wax to help us do so. Join us for more laughs, drama, and intellectual stimulation than you might think possible for a Monday. Tickets here. Philip Gourevitch‘s first book, We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families (1998), which tells the story of the Rwandan genocide, is a masterpiece of reportage (we reviewed it here). His later books A Cold Case (2001) and The Ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008) were published to similar acclaim. In this marvellous interview with Paul Holdengräber, he talks about James Brown, Jonah and the Whale, and the ethics of photography. “We often use these words unthinkable, unspeakable, unimaginable,” he says. “They’re supposed to tell us, these are huge subjects… It’s supposed to make them sound […]
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Master Your Mind with Ruby Wax

Sane New World: A User’s Guide to the Normal-Crazy Mind by Ruby Wax NY: Perigee Trade, 2014; 256pp Mindfulness seems to be less a case of mind over matter than mind over emotion. In this entertaining introduction to neuroplasticity, mental illness, and coping with the tricky business of being, Ruby Wax outlines the potential benefits of employing a mindfulness-based approach to life. The Sane New World of the title is the other side of mental illness, the world beyond what can seem insurmountable to the one in four of us who live with recurring emotional difficulties. The secret? You can change your mind. Sane New World is both self-help and a personal account of life with mental illness. Wax is an American comedian who’s had a prolific career in the UK as a stand-up, script editor (for Absolutely Fabulous), interviewer (check out her program on O.J. Simpson) and TV personality. But as she points out in the early pages of her book, her busyness may not have been an entirely good thing. “You could say that multitasking has driven us mad,” she writes; “like having too many windows open on your computer, eventually it will crash.” The need to be so busy is a symptom of […]
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