The joke I regret

I went in expecting the Susan Calman off the telly, the small cheerful Scottish one being nice to everyone on a Saturday night. That's about a third of this. The rest is her describing depression from the inside with the lights on, and it turns out she was doing the cheerful bit while carrying all of that around, for years, in front of an audience.

Right, I need to be honest about something. When I started it I put a message on the group chat saying I was reading a comedian's book about being sad and I'd report back on whether it was a laugh. Ha ha. Then I got to the chapter where she sets out the mechanics of a bad day, the not-getting-up, the phone going and going on the side, the specific weight of it, and I felt like an absolute cow and I would like it on record that I apologise. It wasn't funny. I knew it wasn't funny while I was typing it and I sent it anyway because I wanted someone to reply.

The good: she's very precise about the difference between being sad and being ill, and she refuses to do the thing where a memoir arrives at a tidy recovery in the final chapter and hands you a lesson on the way out. She's better. She isn't fixed. She has a system, a wife, some dogs and a lot of practice, and she says so plainly. She has a running thing about her lists that I found genuinely useful and I have nicked it wholesale.

The less good, because I'm not going to pretend a book is perfect just because the subject is serious: it's uneven. Some chapters are properly written and some read like a transcribed set with the laughs taken out. There's a long stretch about her legal career that I did not need, and I caught myself flicking ahead to see how much of it was left, a bad sign in a book this size. And the tone lurches. You get a gag about her height, then two paragraphs later you're somewhere very dark indeed — and I don't always think that's deliberate.

But the honesty is what stays with you. She writes about not wanting to exist without dressing it up and without turning it into a big cinematic moment, just as a fact she has lived alongside, and I have not read many people who manage that without either flinching or performing.

I read most of it in the bath, then in bed, then at the kitchen table at half eleven with a tea going cold next to me. Dec asked what it was about and I said depression and he said "cheerful" and I said yes, actually, weirdly, in places.

Seven. I'd hand it to anyone who has a friend they don't quite know how to talk to about this.