“I’m lesbian, I’m short, I’m fat, I’m Jewish, I’m Dickensian,” rattles off Miriam Margolyes, fully aware no string of identity markers could capture her uniqueness. Oh Miriam! is similarly hard to define – a mix of celebrity memoir, sex advice column and anti-Tory soapbox, it demonstrates the loose-cannon plain talk that has endeared her to millions, while pushing back against her caricature. Often snortingly funny, it’s also surprisingly rueful. “Why is it that now I am showered with the work that eluded me for so many years?” she asks.
The book jumps between subjects almost at random, but early sections are the freshest, covering stories of her Belarusian émigré family and her adolescence spent in 1950s Oxford. She saltily updates the Proust Questionnaire, a Victorian parlour game that prompts discussion about overrated virtues and personal mottoes. Margolyes’s own conversational icebreakers include: “Who should define madness?”, “Should cunnilingus be taught in schools?” and “Has America’s legacy bettered or worsened human happiness?”
