Miranda Hart is a British comedy legend, actor and national treasure. Her masterful sitcom, eponymously titled, is an ode to the joy and value of discovering, embracing and celebrating one’s true self. It’s about being playful, imaginative, unique and enjoying the simple pleasures in life.
Miranda’s own life, however, has often been devoid of joy; one of almost continual struggle with debilitating ill health. In I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You, she shares this story with the world, and the techniques, ideas and epiphanies she had along the way that helped her to recover and lead a more joyful, authentic life.
It’s a noble aim, and a very brave endeavour. However, for me, I found this one a lacklustre read at times, although it took me a while to work out exactly why. To be honest, it feels mean, if not downright cruel, to criticise it.
Overreaching
Ultimately it’s because this book awkwardly straddles a couple of different things. It’s half autobiographical, sharing Miranda’s lifelong struggle with ill health due to undiagnosed Lyme Disease. And so all the self-help stuff she shares are things that helped her to recover, and that’s great.
But this book also tries to be a self-help book for everyone, and for me it’s a bit lacklustre. There’s some pearls of wisdom in there, but ultimately it’s advice based on science that Miranda has read and is then imparting to us. I like my science to be a bit more in-depth than ‘Some specialists say that XYZ’, so for me it fell a bit flat here.
Also a lot of the things she tried are the most common of the self-help strategies that lots of us will be familiar with, such as mindfulness or gratitude journaling.
To be clear, these are the things that helped Miranda and I’m very happy for her that they did. It’s just reading a self-help book that is very light on science while talking about these common practices and techniques feels a bit…behind the curve.
Structural struggles
The structuring of the book also undermines its impact and at times makes it confusing and repetitive. Miranda’s broken her learnings down into ‘treasures’, covering a different treasure in each chapter. Yet the chapters still jump from one idea to the next, often sometimes explored in little more than a paragraph or two. And this structure comes at the expense of chronology, so there’s a lot of time hopping.
I Haven’t Been Entirely Honest With You is a brave book – Miranda opens her heart (the Hart heart, as she refers to it at one point) and shares her most personal of struggles. But I feel that in trying to give this book a more universal message she has overstretched.
Instead of sharing her story – a story very worth sharing – and allowing us to draw inspiration from it in whichever way we wish, her book tries to present all the learnings in discrete chunks for us to digest pre-formed.
So while I applaud Miranda for writing this book, I found it difficult to finish and feel that it would have been far more effective had it been much more autobiographical. There’s a lot about Miranda to be inspired by. We’d have found the inspiration in her story without the book trying to spoon feed it to us.
