Miranda Hart's own words open this listing, and they are aimed straight at you: "Hello dear listener and welcome to Peggy & Me, the story of my life after getting a beautiful Shih-Tzu Bichon Frise cross puppy". Publisher copy written in the second person to a listener rather than a reader is rare, and the page confirms why, closing with the flat line "AS READ BY THE AUTHOR". This is an audiobook of seven hours and fifty-eight minutes in which the comedian who wrote the book is the person delivering it, which for this kind of memoir is not a bonus feature but the actual proposition.
A Low Ebb Turned into Dog Administration
Hart spends the opening of her own blurb arguing against the book she has written, which tells you most of what you need to know about the register. She lists the reasons a sane person distrusts dog people: the obsessive talk, the voices they invent for their pets to answer in, the layer of hair on every sofa, and "an alarming comfort and ease around excrement". Then she converts.
Underneath the comedy is a straightforwardly serious book. The puppy arrives, in Hart's phrasing, "when I was at a low ebb in my life", and what follows is a run of "dog administration (dog-min)" and one veterinary humiliation that "still haunts me". The claim she makes for Peggy is not that the dog was funny but that "Peggy was lovingly by my side through some life-changing moments and I wouldn't have coped without her", and that the animal delivered "real lessons about life and love and trust and friendship". A comic memoir organized around a low period, with a dog as the structural device for getting through it, is a more substantial thing than the cover suggests.
Readers who liked it liked it for the person. One five-star review calls the tales "sweet, funny, and relatable to any dog lover" and describes the pleasure of meeting Hart offstage rather than in character. Another finds the book "Funny, insightful, odd at times, but ultimately a delightful book". Another jokes that "Peggy is a surprisingly good writer despite her lack of opposable thumbs", which suggests the dog is treated as a character with opinions rather than as a subject, though the review does not say how far that conceit runs.
Printed in Capitals as Read by the Author
The self-narration argument is unusually strong here, and it does not rest on anyone's opinion of the performance. Hart aimed her blurb at people who would hear the book, not read it. The publisher printed the reading credit in capitals. The book's humor lives in asides, self-interruption and parenthetical retractions, the kind of jokes that exist as timing rather than as sentences, and a written aside has to be reconstructed by a reader while a spoken one simply lands. When a comedian's persona is the product, hearing that persona deliver the material closes a gap that no other reader could.
The audience on this page reinforces the point from an unexpected direction. Four of the five reviewers explicitly arrived from Hart's television work, one after watching the show on a streaming service, and their comments turn repeatedly on her humor and manner rather than on plot or prose. One notes the book is "very much her as on tv and in her show", reasoning that this makes sense because she wrote both. Listeners who came for that specific comic personality are being offered it in the medium where it originated.
For what it is worth, my own preference in comic memoir is almost always the author's own recording, and this is the clearest case of it I have met in a while. The material is confessional, the jokes are conversational, and the person who lived through the low ebb is the one describing it.
One Rating, a 4.5 Average That Doesn't Add Up
Start with the numbers, because they are broken. The ratings field on this listing shows a single rating behind a 4.5 average, which is arithmetically impossible and marks the figure as incomplete rather than informative, while five substantive written reviews sit underneath it. Judge this by the reviews and by the sample, not by the score, and do not read the number as evidence that nobody has bought it. A 2016 title from a major publisher with reviews spanning 2018 to 2022 has clearly circulated.
The most useful dissent comes from a three-star reviewer who describes a book that stopped working. That review opens from an ideal position, a lifelong owner of cats and dogs and a fan of Hart's show, and reports loving the early chapters, praising Hart as "brutally honest" about her "animal goof gene". Then comes the turn: "Until I hit about the halfway mark", and the objection concerns a chapter contrasting cat owners with dog owners and the animals themselves. The sentence breaks off before the specific complaint lands, so I can only report the shape of it: a book about loving all animals becomes, at its midpoint, an argument about which kind of person you are, and at least one animal lover took that as a betrayal of the premise.
Understand the comedy on offer as well. Hart's humor is gentle, self-deprecating and full of British idiom, running to invented compound words, tea, and phrases like "come walkies with Peggy and me". A reviewer calls her sense of humor "very unique", which is affectionate rather than analytical, but it does flag a particular taste rather than broad comedy. Anyone new to her work should sample before committing eight hours, since almost the entire pool arrived already converted.
Sample Ten Minutes Before Committing Eight Hours
Dog owners and Hart's existing audience are the two obvious groups, and the reviews show they overlap heavily. It will also suit listeners who like comic memoir with something real underneath, since the low ebb Hart describes is handled without either evasion or misery. Anyone who enjoys hearing a performer step out of a character they are strongly identified with should find the offstage material genuinely interesting, and one reviewer explicitly frames that as the appeal.
Steer clear if you want a dog book in the training or nature sense. Nothing here is instructional, Peggy is a companion rather than a subject of study, and a reader hoping for insight into canine behavior will get a comedian's household instead. Listeners allergic to whimsy, or to a narrator who addresses them as dear listener, should also take that opening line as a fair warning rather than a flourish.
Where I would push back on the packaging is the suggestion that this is light throughout. It is not, and the better parts are the ones where Hart stops performing. Eight hours in the company of someone being funny about a period she was not enjoying is a specific and worthwhile thing, and the one reviewer who fell out with the book fell out over a chapter's opinions, not over its tone. Sample the first ten minutes, and if the voice suits you, the rest will.
In Brief
- Narrator: the listing prints the reading credit in capitals and the blurb addresses a listener directly, so Miranda Hart delivering her own comic asides is the format's whole argument.
- Subjects: a dog as a way through a low period, comic self-deprecation, life offstage, friendship and trust.
- Tone: warm and chatty with a serious undertow.
- Bottom line: the author's own reading makes this the edition to choose, provided her particular brand of whimsy is yours.
Does Miranda Hart read the Peggy and Me audiobook herself?
Yes. The listing states it in capitals, and the blurb is written as Hart speaking directly to whoever presses play. For a comic memoir built on asides and timing, that matters more than usual, since the jokes are performance rather than sentence construction.
Why does the listing show only one rating?
The ratings field is incomplete. A single rating cannot produce a 4.5 average, and five detailed written reviews sit below it spanning 2018 to 2022. Read the reviews and sample the recording instead, and disregard the number entirely when judging this title.
Do I need to know Miranda Hart's television work first?
Not strictly, but four of the five reviewers arrived that way and their pleasure is bound up with recognizing her manner. Newcomers get a comic memoir about a difficult period and a puppy, which stands alone. Sampling first is sensible, since the humor is distinctive and leans hard on British idiom.
Is the Peggy and Me audiobook really a book about a dog?
Peggy is the organizing device rather than the subject. Hart describes getting the puppy at a low ebb and credits the dog with helping her through life-changing events. Expect a memoir about a rough stretch, told affectionately through an animal, not a pet book or training guide.
