Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
by Jeanette Winterson
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Description
This memoir is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother by the author of "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit"--winner of the Whitbread First Novel award and the inspiration behind the award-winning BBC television adaptation "Oranges."Tags
Recommendations
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thorold Scottish poet vs. Lancashire novelist in a race to discover their biological parents...
akblanchard Both writers survive fundamentalist childhoods and difficult young adulthoods to attain a measure of serenity in middle age.
sparemethecensor Different subject matter but similar nonlinear styles and reflective prose.
KayCliff Both books feature a lonely, gay child growing up, finding salvation in books.
Member Reviews
Un libro de memorias destinado a convertirse en un clásico de la literatura contemporánea.
¿Por qué ser feliz cuando puedes ser normal?, preguntó la señora Winterson a su hija Jeanette cuando ella, recién cumplidos los dieciséis años, le confesó haberse enamorado de otra chica. Extraña pregunta, pero poco más podía esperarse de una mujer que había adoptado a una niña para hacer de ella una aliada en su misión religiosa, y en cambio se las tuvo que ver con un ser extraño que pedía a gritos su porción de felicidad.
Armada con dos juegos de dentadura postiza y una pistola escondida bajo los trapos de cocina, la señora Winterson hizo lo que pudo para disciplinar a Jeanette: en casa los libros estaban prohibidos, las show more amistades eran mal vistas, los besos y abrazos eran gestos extravagantes, y cualquier falta se castigaba con noches enteras al raso, pero de nada sirvió. Esa chica pelirroja que parecía hija del mismo diablo se rebeló, buscando el placer en la piel de otras mujeres y encontrando en la biblioteca del barrio novelas y poemas que la ayudaran a crecer.
Eso y mucho más es lo que ofrecen estas páginas excepcionales, donde alegría y rabia andan de la mano: un libro de memorias destinado a convertirse en un clásico de la literatura contemporánea.
«Necesitaba palabras... show less
¿Por qué ser feliz cuando puedes ser normal?, preguntó la señora Winterson a su hija Jeanette cuando ella, recién cumplidos los dieciséis años, le confesó haberse enamorado de otra chica. Extraña pregunta, pero poco más podía esperarse de una mujer que había adoptado a una niña para hacer de ella una aliada en su misión religiosa, y en cambio se las tuvo que ver con un ser extraño que pedía a gritos su porción de felicidad.
Armada con dos juegos de dentadura postiza y una pistola escondida bajo los trapos de cocina, la señora Winterson hizo lo que pudo para disciplinar a Jeanette: en casa los libros estaban prohibidos, las show more amistades eran mal vistas, los besos y abrazos eran gestos extravagantes, y cualquier falta se castigaba con noches enteras al raso, pero de nada sirvió. Esa chica pelirroja que parecía hija del mismo diablo se rebeló, buscando el placer en la piel de otras mujeres y encontrando en la biblioteca del barrio novelas y poemas que la ayudaran a crecer.
Eso y mucho más es lo que ofrecen estas páginas excepcionales, donde alegría y rabia andan de la mano: un libro de memorias destinado a convertirse en un clásico de la literatura contemporánea.
«Necesitaba palabras... show less
"Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result."
Winterson's bold memoir, an attempt to set the record straight with regards to the half-imagined/half-truthful Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and a genuine effort to question origins of love and being loved, reads just like a memoir version of Winterson's fiction. There is a lot to think about here, a lot of laughs and some very interesting ideas imbued in sadness, anger, and despair. Madness, indeed, is a process, and one wonders how JW has managed not to give into the process entirely. One also wonders how much she must drive everyone around her up the wall. A self-proclaimed "difficult person," JW (as she often refers to herself) is as brilliant and show more brave as she is aggressive and enraged. The book would read like a list of confessions and defenses, but it escapes this fate with the help of Winterson's beautiful language and the story of her three births (birth, adoption, and reconnection with her biological mother).
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the perfect read following or followed by Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? Just wear your psychoanalysis hat! show less
Winterson's bold memoir, an attempt to set the record straight with regards to the half-imagined/half-truthful Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and a genuine effort to question origins of love and being loved, reads just like a memoir version of Winterson's fiction. There is a lot to think about here, a lot of laughs and some very interesting ideas imbued in sadness, anger, and despair. Madness, indeed, is a process, and one wonders how JW has managed not to give into the process entirely. One also wonders how much she must drive everyone around her up the wall. A self-proclaimed "difficult person," JW (as she often refers to herself) is as brilliant and show more brave as she is aggressive and enraged. The book would read like a list of confessions and defenses, but it escapes this fate with the help of Winterson's beautiful language and the story of her three births (birth, adoption, and reconnection with her biological mother).
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the perfect read following or followed by Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother? Just wear your psychoanalysis hat! show less
How can a memoir be so intensely heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time? And also poignantly funny and full of extraordinary language? Too much in this book resonates with me – I could read it over and over again. A little more breathtakingly honest than Oranges are not the only Fruit, if you can imagine that, it’s more to the story of adoption, abandonment and embracing of self as only she can tell it.
Beautifully written, engrossing, and suffused with a love of the saving power of literature.
This is the truer, grittier, more analytical version of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (my review HERE), with an update of Winterson's very recent attempts to trace her birth mother, and interspersed with thoughts on words, writing, literature and a dash of politics of family, class, feminism and sexuality. It is better if you are familiar with Oranges, but not essential. There also seem to be significant autobiographical aspects to Lighthousekeeping, as explained in my review HERE).
NOT "MISERY LIT"
When I read Oranges many years ago, it was before the vogue for "misery lit", a genre I have avoided. However, reading this, I realise that despite show more the erudition and humour, both books are perhaps in that category. Don't let that put you off. Much of Winterson's upbringing was awful: neglect, psychological bullying, deceit and most importantly, lack of love, and yet she comes through it all the stronger and even when she has a major breakdown in later life, still realises that her pain has made her who she is.
PLOT SUMMARY
The story is now well-known, but to recap, Jeanette was adopted by a poor, middle aged, dysfunctional couple who belonged to a Pentecostal church. Most of the time, they all act as if their quirks and cruelty are entirely normal. She escaped into forbidden books and grammar school (an academically-focused school), but fell foul of her family when she fell in love with a girl.
PARENTS = MRS WINTERSON and DAD
Her mother is almost entirely referred to as "Mrs Winterson" (just occasionally "my mum", but never just "Mum"), whereas her father is "Dad" and mostly in the background until old age. Mrs W is the far more vividly drawn character:
"a flamboyant depressive... I think Mrs Winterson was afraid of happiness”.
She was also hypocritical (a supposedly secret smoker who neither believed not practised all the teachings of her chosen church) and who had unexplained disappearances, whereas Dad is just weak, or perhaps too peaceful to stand up to her, who "hated him - not in an angry way, but with a toxic submissive resentment".
“My father was unhappy. My mother was disordered. We were like refugees in our own life.”
“There was a barrier between us, transparent but real.”
“She was her own Enigma code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.”
And specifically about Mrs W:
“Our conversations were like two people using phrase books to say things neither understands.”
But despite all the pain, as a middle aged woman, Winterson notes:
“I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.”
ABANDONMENT
The undercurrent of the book and Winterson’s life is abandonment: given up by her birth mother, unloved and abused by her adopted mother, and abandoned by her first lover as soon as they were caught. In her troublesome teens, she wonders:
“Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing.”
As an adult:
“I have never felt wanted… And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned… but I did not know how to love.”
LOVE OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
"Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”
One of the aspects of this book that I most enjoyed was Winterson's feel and passion for language and literature, enhanced by the lengths she had to go to to enjoy them.
"She [Mrs W] knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work. Books had been forbidden in our house."
The perverse exception was murder mysteries:
"The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late."
But for Winterson:
literature "isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place... She was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere... Do you come back?"
She was not a high flier at school, and yet:
“I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.”
The best thing about Oxford University was:
“Its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life… It was like living in a library and that was where I had always been happiest.”
Writing is even more powerful, and there are two kinds: "the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous." The other side of that coin is that at her lowest point, which is brutally and bravely documented, “language left me”. Terrifying for anyone, let alone a writer. And not for the first time, it is poetry that rescues her, “All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside me now offered a rescue rope… If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered”. “The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.”
Winterson also analyses the narrative of her own life, "Adopted children are self-invented... adoption drops you into the story after it has started". Regarding Mrs W's reaction to Oranges, "What you leave out says as much as those things you include... Mrs W objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story's silent twin." And both twins change when she traces her birth mother. Until then, “My whole identity was built around being an orphan – and an only child”. The meeting is visceral, traumatic, comic, but ultimately somewhat unresolved.
A couple of other wonderful books that have this theme in different ways:
Stoner, my review HERE
Cold Mountain, my review HERE
ANALYSING HERSELF
“I would rather be this me… than the me I might have become without books, without education.”
That education comes to the fore towards the end, in a short chapter called “The Wound” where she compares lots of myths about wounds (literal and metaphorical), adoption, mistaken identity etc. It’s a powerful and erudite exploration of some of the themes in the book, but doesn’t quite fit in style.
There is understandable bitterness towards Mrs W, but despite rejecting the church, she is also grateful to it in some ways. Belief in God helped her when she was small (“God made sense of uncertainty”) and she saw many working class people "living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... Bible study worked their brains". An unintended consequence being that familiarity with the 1611 Bible and daily use of thee and thou in their own speech, made Shakespeare was relatively accessible.
She documents the contradictions of her church (some unpleasant, some merely comical) with a degree of fondness. When homeless and living in a car, she observes, “I was lucky in one way because our church had always emphasised how important it is to concentrate on good things”! In a similar vein, "The one good thing about being shut in a coal hole is that it prompts reflection"! I’m not sure that would be benefit enough to appease a social worker.
PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Her life is about the pursuit of happiness, "life-long, and it is not goal-centred". She says that as a child, she always wanted to escape her life, as did Mrs W in a different way (every night she prayed "Lord, let me die"). However, she also says, “I don’t know anyone, including me, who felt trapped and hopeless”, albeit more in terms of church putting poverty into perspective.
Applying to Oxford was apparently not so much about escape but “because it was the most impossible thing I could do”. In working class areas of the north in the 1970s, men were still in charge, and women undervalued, “My world was full of strong able women who were ‘housewives’ and had to defer to their men”. The result of this strange and traumatic upbringing is that:
“The things that I regret in life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”
TYPES OF ENDING
"When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent."
It would be easy to summarise the book in the lines:
“She longed for me to be free and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.”
and:
"All she ever wanted was for me to go away. And when I did she never forgave me."
However, that would do it a disservice, because it is really far more about the necessity of love – understanding it and fully experiencing it.
Winterson herself categorises three types of ending: revenge, tragedy and forgiveness; this book contains all three. show less
This is the truer, grittier, more analytical version of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (my review HERE), with an update of Winterson's very recent attempts to trace her birth mother, and interspersed with thoughts on words, writing, literature and a dash of politics of family, class, feminism and sexuality. It is better if you are familiar with Oranges, but not essential. There also seem to be significant autobiographical aspects to Lighthousekeeping, as explained in my review HERE).
NOT "MISERY LIT"
When I read Oranges many years ago, it was before the vogue for "misery lit", a genre I have avoided. However, reading this, I realise that despite show more the erudition and humour, both books are perhaps in that category. Don't let that put you off. Much of Winterson's upbringing was awful: neglect, psychological bullying, deceit and most importantly, lack of love, and yet she comes through it all the stronger and even when she has a major breakdown in later life, still realises that her pain has made her who she is.
PLOT SUMMARY
The story is now well-known, but to recap, Jeanette was adopted by a poor, middle aged, dysfunctional couple who belonged to a Pentecostal church. Most of the time, they all act as if their quirks and cruelty are entirely normal. She escaped into forbidden books and grammar school (an academically-focused school), but fell foul of her family when she fell in love with a girl.
PARENTS = MRS WINTERSON and DAD
Her mother is almost entirely referred to as "Mrs Winterson" (just occasionally "my mum", but never just "Mum"), whereas her father is "Dad" and mostly in the background until old age. Mrs W is the far more vividly drawn character:
"a flamboyant depressive... I think Mrs Winterson was afraid of happiness”.
She was also hypocritical (a supposedly secret smoker who neither believed not practised all the teachings of her chosen church) and who had unexplained disappearances, whereas Dad is just weak, or perhaps too peaceful to stand up to her, who "hated him - not in an angry way, but with a toxic submissive resentment".
“My father was unhappy. My mother was disordered. We were like refugees in our own life.”
“There was a barrier between us, transparent but real.”
“She was her own Enigma code and me and my dad were not Bletchley Park.”
And specifically about Mrs W:
“Our conversations were like two people using phrase books to say things neither understands.”
But despite all the pain, as a middle aged woman, Winterson notes:
“I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.”
ABANDONMENT
The undercurrent of the book and Winterson’s life is abandonment: given up by her birth mother, unloved and abused by her adopted mother, and abandoned by her first lover as soon as they were caught. In her troublesome teens, she wonders:
“Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing.”
As an adult:
“I have never felt wanted… And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned… but I did not know how to love.”
LOVE OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
"Books don’t make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.”
One of the aspects of this book that I most enjoyed was Winterson's feel and passion for language and literature, enhanced by the lengths she had to go to to enjoy them.
"She [Mrs W] knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work. Books had been forbidden in our house."
The perverse exception was murder mysteries:
"The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late."
But for Winterson:
literature "isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place... She was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere... Do you come back?"
She was not a high flier at school, and yet:
“I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.”
The best thing about Oxford University was:
“Its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life… It was like living in a library and that was where I had always been happiest.”
Writing is even more powerful, and there are two kinds: "the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous." The other side of that coin is that at her lowest point, which is brutally and bravely documented, “language left me”. Terrifying for anyone, let alone a writer. And not for the first time, it is poetry that rescues her, “All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside me now offered a rescue rope… If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered”. “The poem finds the word that finds the feeling.”
Winterson also analyses the narrative of her own life, "Adopted children are self-invented... adoption drops you into the story after it has started". Regarding Mrs W's reaction to Oranges, "What you leave out says as much as those things you include... Mrs W objected to what I had put in, but it seemed to me that what I had left out was the story's silent twin." And both twins change when she traces her birth mother. Until then, “My whole identity was built around being an orphan – and an only child”. The meeting is visceral, traumatic, comic, but ultimately somewhat unresolved.
A couple of other wonderful books that have this theme in different ways:
Stoner, my review HERE
Cold Mountain, my review HERE
ANALYSING HERSELF
“I would rather be this me… than the me I might have become without books, without education.”
That education comes to the fore towards the end, in a short chapter called “The Wound” where she compares lots of myths about wounds (literal and metaphorical), adoption, mistaken identity etc. It’s a powerful and erudite exploration of some of the themes in the book, but doesn’t quite fit in style.
There is understandable bitterness towards Mrs W, but despite rejecting the church, she is also grateful to it in some ways. Belief in God helped her when she was small (“God made sense of uncertainty”) and she saw many working class people "living a deeper, more thoughtful life than would have been possible without the church... Bible study worked their brains". An unintended consequence being that familiarity with the 1611 Bible and daily use of thee and thou in their own speech, made Shakespeare was relatively accessible.
She documents the contradictions of her church (some unpleasant, some merely comical) with a degree of fondness. When homeless and living in a car, she observes, “I was lucky in one way because our church had always emphasised how important it is to concentrate on good things”! In a similar vein, "The one good thing about being shut in a coal hole is that it prompts reflection"! I’m not sure that would be benefit enough to appease a social worker.
PURSUIT OF HAPPINESS
Her life is about the pursuit of happiness, "life-long, and it is not goal-centred". She says that as a child, she always wanted to escape her life, as did Mrs W in a different way (every night she prayed "Lord, let me die"). However, she also says, “I don’t know anyone, including me, who felt trapped and hopeless”, albeit more in terms of church putting poverty into perspective.
Applying to Oxford was apparently not so much about escape but “because it was the most impossible thing I could do”. In working class areas of the north in the 1970s, men were still in charge, and women undervalued, “My world was full of strong able women who were ‘housewives’ and had to defer to their men”. The result of this strange and traumatic upbringing is that:
“The things that I regret in life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.”
TYPES OF ENDING
"When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken. Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent."
It would be easy to summarise the book in the lines:
“She longed for me to be free and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.”
and:
"All she ever wanted was for me to go away. And when I did she never forgave me."
However, that would do it a disservice, because it is really far more about the necessity of love – understanding it and fully experiencing it.
Winterson herself categorises three types of ending: revenge, tragedy and forgiveness; this book contains all three. show less
When I heard that Jeanette Winterson had revisited the childhood and youth she had depicted in her autobiographical debut novel, Oranges Aren’t the Only Fruit, in the form of a memoir, I wondered why. But my wife read it and assured me it was not a retread. One reason is apparent when she writes that she is often asked by readers of Oranges if her childhood was that bad. It wasn’t, she invariably answers: it was worse. I may never shake the image of the child locked in the coal bin singing “Cheer Up, Ye Saints of God” at the top of her lungs.
The other reason is that the account of Winterson’s life until she leaves home at sixteen is accompanied by a sequel, in which she goes mad, attempts to end her life, then tracks down and show more meets her birth mother. I appreciated the honesty with which Winterson observed and reported her meetings with Ann. There is the recognition of physical and mental similarities, as well as Ann’s assurance, “You were wanted.” Yet this is no treacly instant family moment, beloved of genealogy-based television shows; Winterson also records her explosion at their third meeting, as she boils over with rage over the abandonment that is the deepest level of her psyche.
One woman birthed her, another raised her, and the latter, the imposing figure for whom “life was a pre-death experience,” formed Winterson. The unloved child discovered words as her refuge, books as doors to other worlds. She read her way through the local library, English Literature, A-Z. A recurrent theme is how institutions like the library and the Mechanics’ Institute, where working-class men took evening courses for improvement, sustained a community in the small town she grew up in. She is unsparing in her criticism of how the hollowing of those institutions has impoverished life.
Another institution that formed her was the Pentecostal church she attended with Mr. and Mrs. Winterson. It was another thing she left behind when she left home, but she also offers a positive description of her own baptism by immersion when she was thirteen, and she describes many of the ways the congregation added to a sense of community.
Jeanette Winterson can be unsparing both toward herself and others, but this book’s overall tone is life-affirming. show less
The other reason is that the account of Winterson’s life until she leaves home at sixteen is accompanied by a sequel, in which she goes mad, attempts to end her life, then tracks down and show more meets her birth mother. I appreciated the honesty with which Winterson observed and reported her meetings with Ann. There is the recognition of physical and mental similarities, as well as Ann’s assurance, “You were wanted.” Yet this is no treacly instant family moment, beloved of genealogy-based television shows; Winterson also records her explosion at their third meeting, as she boils over with rage over the abandonment that is the deepest level of her psyche.
One woman birthed her, another raised her, and the latter, the imposing figure for whom “life was a pre-death experience,” formed Winterson. The unloved child discovered words as her refuge, books as doors to other worlds. She read her way through the local library, English Literature, A-Z. A recurrent theme is how institutions like the library and the Mechanics’ Institute, where working-class men took evening courses for improvement, sustained a community in the small town she grew up in. She is unsparing in her criticism of how the hollowing of those institutions has impoverished life.
Another institution that formed her was the Pentecostal church she attended with Mr. and Mrs. Winterson. It was another thing she left behind when she left home, but she also offers a positive description of her own baptism by immersion when she was thirteen, and she describes many of the ways the congregation added to a sense of community.
Jeanette Winterson can be unsparing both toward herself and others, but this book’s overall tone is life-affirming. show less
Jeannette Winterson is a very celebrated writer. She's won the Whitbread Prize and her fictional account of her bizarre Pentecostal childhood, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, has been dramatized for television. She's been awarded the OBE for her services to literature and she is one of the giants of the British writing establishment. She's been lauded to the moon and back. So her memoir, covering much of the same time period as Oranges, should have been incredibly compelling. But instead, somehow, it totally missed the mark for me.
Winterson was adopted into an abusive, fanatically religious Pentecostal home where she never felt loved or wanted. Her mother spent much of her childhood shaming her and abusing her emotionally so it's no show more wonder that the tone of this memoir is so incredibly dark, rancorous, and unforgiving. Winterson details the punishments she suffers at her adoptive mother's hand and her own internalizing of her limited self-worth. With such an unhappy childhood, it is no wonder that she is so damaged and emotionally stunted. Starting with a description of Mrs. Winterson, as she calls her mother from the vantage point of her now many years of emotional remove, she speculates on what drove this depressed and rigid woman to adopt. From there she quickly announces the publication of her much-celebrated novel, a fictionalized look at her own childhood, that could only cast her fanatical mother and the upbringing she suffered under this woman in a very bad light before she jumps into the meat of her narrative.
Much of the early portion of this memoir hews closely to the tale told in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And although Winterson is detailing the ways in which she was beaten down, belittled, and destroyed as a child and young woman, she also offers up those small acts of defiance and self-preservation that enabled her to weather the dysfunction in her home and to finally, with the help of other sympathetic people, escape the hate. She examines the actions and the reactions that shaped her into the woman and the writer that she's become. But when she goes to move past her successes in spite of her upbringing, she is unable to fill in the blanks of a 25 year intermission, saying that it is too painful to address at this point in her life, which begs the question why she wrote the memoir at all. Is it simply to excoriate the woman who raised her? Was it to lay blame on the young girl who gave birth to her and allowed her to be adopted by the Wintersons? If a memoir doesn't invite self-disclosure and an examination of the whole of a life as it is lived so far, then what does it become?
In this case, Winterson's tale might have been cathartic for her to write (at least as far as she was able to write it), but it was fairly painful to read, dry, emotionally distant, and ultimately rather dull. The writing was intentional and impressive but also scattered and didactic. There was a heavy-handed direction in how the reader is supposed to react to each instance in Winterson's life, from her devastating childhood to her depressed and suicidal adulthood, and yet despite the signposts, the emotional barrenness kept me from reaching the place I was supposed to feel. Although there is still a distinct feeling of her continued suffering and victimization in these pages, she does do quite a good job placing her coming of age and coming out in historical context and that saves this memoir from being simply a rage against both of her mothers, adoptive and biological, and a congratulatory reinforcement of her own professional accomplishments. I came away from this reading extremely grateful that I was finished with the book and incredibly reluctant to read anything else that Winterson has read is this is any indication of her style. show less
Winterson was adopted into an abusive, fanatically religious Pentecostal home where she never felt loved or wanted. Her mother spent much of her childhood shaming her and abusing her emotionally so it's no show more wonder that the tone of this memoir is so incredibly dark, rancorous, and unforgiving. Winterson details the punishments she suffers at her adoptive mother's hand and her own internalizing of her limited self-worth. With such an unhappy childhood, it is no wonder that she is so damaged and emotionally stunted. Starting with a description of Mrs. Winterson, as she calls her mother from the vantage point of her now many years of emotional remove, she speculates on what drove this depressed and rigid woman to adopt. From there she quickly announces the publication of her much-celebrated novel, a fictionalized look at her own childhood, that could only cast her fanatical mother and the upbringing she suffered under this woman in a very bad light before she jumps into the meat of her narrative.
Much of the early portion of this memoir hews closely to the tale told in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And although Winterson is detailing the ways in which she was beaten down, belittled, and destroyed as a child and young woman, she also offers up those small acts of defiance and self-preservation that enabled her to weather the dysfunction in her home and to finally, with the help of other sympathetic people, escape the hate. She examines the actions and the reactions that shaped her into the woman and the writer that she's become. But when she goes to move past her successes in spite of her upbringing, she is unable to fill in the blanks of a 25 year intermission, saying that it is too painful to address at this point in her life, which begs the question why she wrote the memoir at all. Is it simply to excoriate the woman who raised her? Was it to lay blame on the young girl who gave birth to her and allowed her to be adopted by the Wintersons? If a memoir doesn't invite self-disclosure and an examination of the whole of a life as it is lived so far, then what does it become?
In this case, Winterson's tale might have been cathartic for her to write (at least as far as she was able to write it), but it was fairly painful to read, dry, emotionally distant, and ultimately rather dull. The writing was intentional and impressive but also scattered and didactic. There was a heavy-handed direction in how the reader is supposed to react to each instance in Winterson's life, from her devastating childhood to her depressed and suicidal adulthood, and yet despite the signposts, the emotional barrenness kept me from reaching the place I was supposed to feel. Although there is still a distinct feeling of her continued suffering and victimization in these pages, she does do quite a good job placing her coming of age and coming out in historical context and that saves this memoir from being simply a rage against both of her mothers, adoptive and biological, and a congratulatory reinforcement of her own professional accomplishments. I came away from this reading extremely grateful that I was finished with the book and incredibly reluctant to read anything else that Winterson has read is this is any indication of her style. show less
This book is a new addition to my most favorite books ever! I must have used about a half a tin of those little copper page markers, there were just so many poignant events and wonderful insights throughout this book. This is the story of Jeanette, whose adoptive mother was difficult and unloving, to say the least. Abusive comes to mind. And yet, Jeanette rises above it, buffered by a few key individuals and by her boundless love of books. Lest this scare any readers away, I did not find this to be a sad book. There are sad moments, but it is also, reflective, very funny, and so wise. The stories are unforgettable and I cannot wait to read more by this amazing author.
First, a taste of her sad childhood: "When she knew I was keeping a show more diary she said, 'I never kept secrets from my mother...but I am not your mother, am I?' And after that she never was. When I wanted to learn to play her piano she said, ' When you come back from school I will have sold it.' She had."
On a lighter note, here is one of Winterson's literary insights from Jack and the Beanstalk. "The bridge (the Beanstalk) between the two worlds is unpredictable and very surprising. And later, when the giant tries to climb after Jack, the beanstalk has to be chopped down pronto. This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements -- we get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the 'other world' can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we 'win' will accommodate itself to our size and form..."
And as to how Winterson writes, in a nonlinear form (which I loved!): Her mother discovered Jeanette's hidden trove of books and immediately suspected the worst: Satanism and pornography. She took all her books and threw them out the window into the backyard. Then she set them on fire while Jeanette watched.
"I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. And books have always been light and warmth to me.
"I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone.
"In the morning there were stray bits of text all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.
"It is probably why I write as I do -- collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? 'These fragments have I shored against my ruin...'"
From these ashes, a wonderful story and a great writer, one who appreciates how her bitter youth made her the woman she is today. Highly recommended. 5 stars. show less
First, a taste of her sad childhood: "When she knew I was keeping a show more diary she said, 'I never kept secrets from my mother...but I am not your mother, am I?' And after that she never was. When I wanted to learn to play her piano she said, ' When you come back from school I will have sold it.' She had."
On a lighter note, here is one of Winterson's literary insights from Jack and the Beanstalk. "The bridge (the Beanstalk) between the two worlds is unpredictable and very surprising. And later, when the giant tries to climb after Jack, the beanstalk has to be chopped down pronto. This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements -- we get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the 'other world' can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we 'win' will accommodate itself to our size and form..."
And as to how Winterson writes, in a nonlinear form (which I loved!): Her mother discovered Jeanette's hidden trove of books and immediately suspected the worst: Satanism and pornography. She took all her books and threw them out the window into the backyard. Then she set them on fire while Jeanette watched.
"I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. And books have always been light and warmth to me.
"I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone.
"In the morning there were stray bits of text all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.
"It is probably why I write as I do -- collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? 'These fragments have I shored against my ruin...'"
From these ashes, a wonderful story and a great writer, one who appreciates how her bitter youth made her the woman she is today. Highly recommended. 5 stars. show less
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ThingScore 75
Where Winterson's debut, a tragic-comic tale of a young girl who is adopted by Pentecostal missionaries in Accrington, offered us a semi-fictionalised version of her childhood, her latest describes the reality. And what a hellish reality it was. Winterson's story is one of abandonment, loneliness, madness and defiance. It is both inspiring and appalling, its cruellest details only made show more digestible by the restrained elegance of Winterson's prose. show less
added by thorold
This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read, and it also feels like the most turbulent and the least controlled.
added by thorold
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Author Information
55+ Works 37,131 Members
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford. Her book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a semi-autobiographical account of her life as a child preacher (she wrote and gave sermons by the time she was eight years old). The book was the winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first show more fiction and was made into an award-winning TV movie. The Passion won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for best writer under thirty-five, and Sexing the Cherry won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award. (Bowker Author Biography) Jeanette Winterson lives in London & the Cotswolds. (Publisher Provided) show less
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Awards and Honors
Awards
Distinctions
Work Relationships
Is retold in
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
- Original title
- Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
- Original publication date
- 2011
- People/Characters
- Jeanette Winterson; La Sra. Winterson (su madre)
- Important places
- Accrington, Lancashire, England, UK
- Dedication
- To my three mothers:
Constance Winterson
Ruth Rendell
Ann S - First words
- When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, 'The Devil led us to the wrong crib.'
- Quotations
- When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love - its quality - to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love ... (show all)that sets.
Me he dado cuénta de que hacer lo más inteligente solo es una buena idea cuando se trata de decisiones pequeñas. Para las cosas que te cambian la vida hay que arriesgarse. - Last words
- (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.)I have no idea what happens next.
- Original language
- English
- Canonical DDC/MDS
- 823.914
- Canonical LCC
- PR6073.I558
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Statistics
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- 8,261
- Reviews
- 104
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- 10 — Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 49
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- 18