Ruby Wax has said she thinks the reason Donald Trump did not make a pass at her when she interviewed him almost three decades ago was because she is too clever. “I’m not his type. I have a brain,” she told the Hay festival in Wales.
Speaking at the literary festival to promote her latest book, I’m Not as Well as I Thought I Was, the broadcaster and comedian spoke about the 1996 interview on Trump’s private jet, in which she laughed when he told her he wanted to run for president.
“He said, ‘Land the plane,’ because he found me obnoxious – I found him obnoxious,” she said. “He reminded me of my dad, he – he had those killer eyes.”
Wax’s parents, Austrian Jews who fled their country in 1938 because of the Nazi threat, abused her when she was a child. To this day she only likes to sleep in small rooms where she can clearly see the doorknob, because her mother would burst into the room when she was sleeping as a child.
Having not known a loving home as a child, she has struggled to have a sense of home as an adult. “I have no home. That’s sort of the end, my conclusion. I don’t have a home. I never did. But home has to be where I am,” she said.
She also does not believe that she ever really knew her parents. “I just met other traumatised people,” she said. “I feel sorry for them, but I don’t know who they were.”
As a young adult, Wax used comedy as a coping mechanism for her childhood trauma and mental health issues. “I had to be funny, otherwise I would have [killed myself],” she said.
Last year, Wax was admitted to a mental hospital because of her depression. She underwent repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment, which uses magnetic pulses to stimulate parts of the patient’s brain. “It zaps you 80 times a second,” she explained. “If you go 20 times in a row, it has a 65% success rate.”
“It worked for me,” added the comedian, who also uses mindfulness to help her take her “internal temperature” and know when a depressive episode is coming on.
Yet Wax rejects the idea that what she has overcome in her life makes her brave. “Bravery would be running into the street and saving somebody before they get hit by a car, which I haven’t done yet.”
According to Wax, climbing Mount Everest does not necessarily make someone brave either – people do it, she said, because “they’re junkies”.
• This article was amended on 29 May 2023 to describe more accurately how repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation works.
