Book 861: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? – Jeanette Winterson

I picked this book up way back in November 2014 because I’d been hearing great things about it and remembered enjoying Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in undergrad (and still languishing on my TBR shelf).

I only read this at this moment in time because a few months ago I created a spreadsheet of all the books on my TBR shelf that were under 250 pages that randomly spits out a book title so when I had a bit of a gap or wanted to actually make progress on my shelves I had an easy tool to select a book.

I’d honestly forgotten that Winterson was adopted, but as I read this story the parallels with Oranges started to come back and so much of it made sense on a different level. I found this work to be just as creative and humorous (if darkly humorous) as I found Oranges and it reminded me that I really should look into her other works.

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear . . . Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world. (34)

There were quite a few major themes in this but the ones that spoke most to me were when she talked about how books and literature offered her an escape from growing up and her struggle to find herself and find love from childhood to adulthood.

I was fascinated, baffled, and appalled at her relationship with her adoptive mother. There was absolutely abuse by today’s standards, of both Jeanette and her father, and there was absolutely neglect. Just because it’s happening to everyone around you doesn’t make it right. And if anything, the way she treated Winterson just makes her survival and thriving as an author that much more powerful. I found Winterson’s switching between calling her “mother”, “Mrs. W”, or “Mrs Winterson” fascinating. I couldn’t find rhyme or reason in it, but it felt more in the flashbacks when she had the rosy glow of the past she used mother more often. I was glad Winterson wrote about meeting her biological mom and family, and that she was honest about not really knowing how to feel about it.

Books, for me, are a home. 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.

There is warmth there too — a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly night son the doorstep. (61)

My favorite part of this memoir was learning that Winterson tried to read the library A-Z. I mean it just makes sense to do that. It gives structure and a destination for someone who has none at home or elsewhere in their life. And when Winterson finally mentioned this to a teacher who broke her out of the mentality, it was hilarious and daunting to watch because how could it not shake Winterson loose. And then there was this little bit of advice to live by:

My advice is this. When you are young and you read something that you very much dislike, put it aside and read it again three years later. And if you still dislike it, read it again in a further three years. And when you are no longer young — when you are fifty, as am I — read the thing again that you disliked most of all. (126)

I’ve slowly been making my way through a lot of the “classics” we had to read in high school and some are definitely much better with more life experience so I’m wondering if others will be too.

The overarching theme though of the novel is love and whether or not Winterson can love or can accept love. It was hard to read at points due to the way her mother behaved and raised her, but it was even more heartbreaking how sparsely Winterson wrote about her own experience loving and being loved as an adult. It was almost in a vacuum. There were a couple of partners mentioned, including the one who supported her the most her now ex-wife, but their relationships aren’t the focus of the book which just left me a bit hollow wondering whether or not she has figured out how to love and be loved.

At the same time, I do wonder if Winterson casts herself as the epic love story that never happened with a quote like this after her first relationship with a woman is discovered by her mother and then ended because of the church exorcism:

So this is it — not Heathcliff, not Cathy, not Romeo and Juliet, not love laid end to end like a road across the world. I thought we could go anywhere. I thought we could be map and globe, route and compass. I thought we were each other’s world. I thought . . .

We were not lovers, we were love. (83)

How do you come back from that? When it’s your first love you’re barely old enough to know who you are let alone who you are with someone else. It’s interesting she picks two sets of young lovers that had tragic endings, so maybe she just knows that’s where she’s going to be in the end. I’m not sure and I don’t think Winterson is either, like the last line of the book.

Recommendation: This was a fascinating read. It had been on my shelf for so long that I’d forgotten why I’d purchased it. I’m glad I’d previously read some of Winterson’s work as it gave me the connection and at minimum prepared me for some of the abuse and neglect that Winterson actually experienced as a child. I truly enjoyed the way Winterson weaved her childhood in poverty, the search for her birth mother, and her relationships as an adult and teen into a beautiful story through literature. I really should read more of her works.

Opening Line: “When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.'”

Closing Line: “I have no idea what happens next.” (Not whited out as this is a work of nonfiction.)

Additional Quotes from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
“Manchester was all mix. It was radical — Marx and Engels were here. It was repressive — the Peterloo Massacres and the Corn Laws. Manchester spun riches beyond anybody’s wildest dreams, and wove despair and degradation into the human fabric. It was Utilitarian, in that everything was put to the test of ‘Does this work?’ It was Utopian — its Quakerism, its feminism, its anti-slavery movement, its socialism, its communism.” (13)

“It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing: the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.” (54)

“As I pondered the horrors of heterosexuality I realised that I need not feel sorry for either of my parents; my mother hadn’t read it [“a 1950s sex manual called How to Please Your Husband“] — perhaps she had opened it once, realised the extent of the task, and put it away. The book was flat, pristine, intact. So whatever my father had had to do without, and I really don’t think they ever had sex, he hadn’t had to spend his nights with MRs W with one hand on his penis and the other holding the manual while she followed the instructions.” (103)

“When I was sixteen I had only got as far as M — not counting Shakespeare, who is not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour. Black is all the colours and Shakespeare is all the alphabet. I was reading his plays and sonnets the way you get dressed every morning. You don’t ask yourself, ‘Shall I get dressed today?’ (On the days you don’t get dressed you are not well enough either mentally or physically, to be able to ask —  but we’ll go there later.).” (115)

“But Woolf and Stein were radical to use real people in their fictions and to muddle their facts — Orlando with its actual photos of Vita Sackville-West, and Alice Toklas the supposed writer [of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas], who is Stein’s lover but not the writer . . .

For me, fascinated with identity, and how you define yourself, those books were crucial. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open — the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.” (119)