Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? This question resonates in my head, again and again. The context shocked me.

Jeanette Winterson is one author that I discovered only recently. I rarely read memoirs, but this one is different, and I couldn’t believe how quickly it convinced me. I didn’t read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. It is a novel that is based on real events from her youth. The author often mentions this book and its content.

Winterson was adopted at a young age. Her adopted mother often locked her out of the house, so she spent the entire night outside. We can add that Mrs. Winterson was waiting for Armageddon and had a revolver in the kitchen drawer. You can imagine the rest. Her adopted mother was anything but a good mother. 

We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don't.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is Winterson’s search for home and happiness, but it is also a deep exploration of her feelings and self. 

To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.

 

 

Goodreads

Details:

• author: Jeanette Winterson
  
• full title: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
• genre: memoir
• format/type: booknonfiction
  
• country: United Kingdom
  
• topics: #coming-of-age, #home, #mother, #books, #writing
  
• publisher: Vintage
  
• publish date: 12.04.2012
  
• pages: 230
  

My Rating of the Book:

• content: 💙💙💙💙💙

Excerpt from the Book:

About the Author:

Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.

Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.