Why be happy when you could be normal?

Review by New York Times Review

"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" is a memoir as unconventional and winning as the rollicking bildungsroman Winterson assembled from the less malignant aspects of her eccentric Pentecostal upbringing, a novel that instantly established her distinctive voice. This new book wrings humor from adversity, as did the fictionalized version of Winterson's youth, but the ghastly childhood transfigured there is not the same as the one vivisected here in search of truth and its promise of setting the cleareyed free. At the center of both narratives is "Mrs. Winterson," as the author often calls her mother in "Why Be Happy." It would be easy to dismiss this formality as an attempt to establish retroactively something that never existed between Winterson and her adoptive mother: a respectful, distance governed by commonly accepted standards of decency and reason. But, even more, the form of address suggests the terrible grandeur of a character who transcends the strictly mortal in her dimensions and her power, a monolith to whom any version of "mother" cannot do justice. "Tallish and weighing around 20 stone" (in other words, about 280 pounds), Mrs. Winterson, now deceased, was "out of scale, larger than life," "now and again exploding to her full 300 feet," a force that eclipsed Winterson's self-effacing father, who couldn't protect himself, let alone his child, from the woman he had married. It wasn't her physical size that tipped Mrs. Winterson from mere gravity toward the psychic equivalent of a black hole, vacuuming all the light into her hysterical fundamentalism, so much as it was her monumental derangement. "A flamboyant depressive . . . who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge," Mrs. Winterson waited not in joyful so much as smug anticipation for the apocalypse that would destroy the neighbors and deliver her to the exalted status piety had earned her. Opposed to sexual intercourse, as she was to all forms of intimacy, Winterson's mother adopted her in hopes of raising a friend, the author speculates, for her mother had no other. But the trouble Mrs. Winterson found in reading a book, "that you never know what's in it until it's too late," is the same trouble that complicates parenthood. Or, as Mrs. Winterson explained it: "The Devil led us to the wrong crib." THUS began the story of a mother's failure to revise what she found objectionable in the creature from whom she expected comfort. Beatings made no difference, nor did being "shut in a coal hole" or routinely locked out of the house all night. As for the three-day exorcism occasioned by Mrs. Winterson's discovery of her daughter's physical attraction to her own sex: no demon emerged to "set the curtains on fire or fly into the dog," requiring that it be strangled. It's a testament to Winterson's innate generosity, as well as her talent, that she can showcase the outsize humor her mother's equally capacious craziness provides even as she reveals the cruelties Mrs. Winterson imposed on her in the name of rearing a God-fearing Christian. "The one good thing about being shut in a coal hole is that it prompts reflection," Winterson observes, inspiring the question always asked of writers like her, who appear to have transcended misfortunes that might have crippled or silenced another. How did Jeanette Winterson recover from the fantastically bad luck of landing in the embrace of a woman who understood motherhood as a daily struggle with the Devil over the ownership of her child's soul? "What we notice in stories," Winterson answers toward the end of her memoir, "is the nearness of the wound to the gift." From Oedipus to Harry Potter, literature has provided unlimited examples of the wounded hero, a gallery in which Winterson places herself, having followed her own "blood-trail" back to its source, and the gift that would offer salvation. "My mother," Winterson explains, "was in charge of language." Though she forbade her daughter access to secular books, Mrs. Winterson read from the Bible each evening, standing - towering - as she did so. And she read well enough that her daughter "got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound" but eternal. Mrs. Winterson may have found reason to suspect her daughter of cultivating unforgivable secret sins, yet she also trusted her enough to send her to the public library each week to collect the murder mysteries to which she was addicted, as even she was unable to suppress her need for the escape that fiction offered from the claustrophobia of the life her faith dictated. "A book is a door," Winterson discovered in the library. "You open it. You step through." Once she embarked on ENGLISH LITERATURE IN PROSE A-Z, Winterson began to see a way out of the coal hole and into the light. Ambitious in her own (and anyone else's) estimation, she reacted to her mother's confiscation of her secret stash of paperbacks by turning her attention to something no one could take away: the words inside her head and what she could make with them. Determined - desperate - Winterson left home at 16; she applied "to read English at Oxford because it was the most impossible thing" she could think of; she graduated; she wrote books that transported readers because they were conceived to transport their author. FICTION has its limits, however. Arriving at midlife, Winterson discovers she can get only so far from Mrs. Winterson, either on the pages of a novel or in life, before she's brought up short, like a dog on a chain, returned to the wound that made writing necessary in the first place. "I can't remember a time when I wasn't setting my story against hers," she reflects, the safety in opposing her mother having been revealed as a sham. Comedy can no longer divert her from the past. Tragedy, graceful and stately in pace, arriving at Aristotelian catharsis, doesn't provide a vessel for the chaos of suffering in real time. The one literary form Winterson can deploy to organize and bring meaning to her experience is her favorite, the quest, which pits her against an enemy she has no idea how to fight. Like Perseus, the heroine must enter the gorgon's cave not knowing how, or if, she will emerge. To confront Mrs. Winterson head on, in life, in nonfiction, demands courage; to survive requires imagination. Perseus avoids Medusa's paralyzing gaze by looking at her reflection on the surface of his shield. The author must be even more clever. But put your money on Jeanette Winterson. Seventeen books ago, she proved she had what she needed. Heroines are defined not by their wounds but by their triumphs. Jeanette Winterson was adopted, but her mother insisted that 'the Devil led as to the wrong crib.' Kathryn Harrison's most recent novel, "Enchantments," has just been published.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [March 11, 2012]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* Winterson's volatile and eccentrically devout adoptive mother was apocalyptic by nature. In self-defense, as we learn in this galvanizing memoir and testimony to the healing properties of creativity, Winterson took shelter in the library, discovering in poetry and fiction language powerful enough to say how it is. After she acquired some books of her own, only to have her ogre of a mother burn them, Winterson summoned her resolve: Fuck it,' I thought, I can write my own.' She was similarly stoic when her mother caught her in bed with another girl and arranged for an exorcism that turned sexually abusive. Winterson fled her bleak Lancashire home at 16, got herself to Oxford, and wrote her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which became a beacon in gay culture. Drawing on her cartwheel imagination and piercing worldview, Winterson wrote a dozen more books (Sexing the Cherry, 1990; The Stone Gods, 2008) to resounding acclaim. But her long-submerged anguish finally boiled up, leading to a breakdown, an unnerving search for her birth mother, and an all-out struggle to understand what it is to love and be loved. Clarion, courageous, and vividly expressive, Winterson conducts a dramatic and revelatory inquiry into the forging of the self and the liberating power of literature.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

"What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?" Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) asks of her relationship with her adoptive mother, questions that haunt this raw memoir to its final pages. Winterson first finds solace in the Accrington Public Library in Lancashire, where she stumbles across T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and begins to cry: "the unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day." She is asked to leave the library for crying and sits on the steps in "the usual northern gale" to finish the book. The rest is history. Highly improbably for a woman of her class, she gets into Oxford and goes on to have a very successful literary career. But she finds that literature-and literary success-can only fulfill so much in her. There's another ingredient missing: love. The latter part of the book concerns itself with this quest, in which Winterson learns that the problem is not so much being gay (for which her mother tells her "you'll be in Hell") as it is in the complex nature of how to love anyone when one has only known perverse love as a child. This is a highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and endearing memoir. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by School Library Journal Review

Raised by adoptive parents in a grimy north England industrial town, Winterson endured a religious fanatic of a mother with two sets of dentures and a tendency to lock her daughter out of the house at night. As the author searched for her biological mother, fiction and poetry provided a lifeline. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The Battle of the Sun, 2010, etc.) revisits her difficult childhood as an adoptee, chronicling the search for her biological mother. The author ponders her youth and examines how those challenging years changed and shaped her as an adult. Frequently locked out on the doorstep by her abusive, Pentecostal, adoptive mother or often told she was "a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature," Winterson wondered if she had ever been wanted, by her biological or adoptive mother. The author struggled with the ebb and flow of Mrs. Winterson's love, finding escape from her mood swings in the local public library, where she devoured a wide variety of literature. When her secret stash of books was discovered and burned, Winterson rebelled by claiming she would write her own books one day. At age 16, she was kicked out of the house and forced to live in her car. Books and words brought comfort and led Winterson to Oxford and writing, but she descended into a deep depression when her lover left her. The search for her true identity and her birth mother helped bring her back from the darkness. Rich in detail and the history of the northern English town of Accrington, Winterson's narrative allows readers to ponder, along with the author, the importance of feeling wanted and loved. A moving, honest look at life as an abused adopted child.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, 'The Devil led us to the wrong crib.'   The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 -- purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson -- has a flamboyant theatricality to it. She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. A woman with a prolapse, a thyroid condition, an enlarged heart, an ulcerated leg that never healed, and two sets of false teeth -- matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for 'best'.   I do not know why she didn't/couldn't have children. I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world -- a way of saying that she was here -- a kind of X Marks the Spot.   She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents -- we don't really have any choice.   She was alive when my first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit , was published in 1985. It is semiautobiographical, in that it tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. The girl leaves home, gets herself to Oxford University, returns home to find her mother has built a broadcast radio and is beaming out the Gospel to the heathen. The mother has a handle -- she's called 'Kindly Light'.   The novel begins: ' Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle. '   For most of my life I've been a bare-knuckle fighter. The one who wins is the one who hits the hardest. I was beaten as a child and I learned early never to cry. If I was locked out overnight I sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school. We always walked. We had no car and no bus money. For me, the average was five miles a day: two miles for the round trip to school; three miles for the round trip to church.   Church was every night except Thursdays.   I wrote about some of these things in Oranges , and when it was published, my mother sent me a furious note in her immaculate copperplate handwriting demanding a phone call.   We hadn't seen each other for several years. I had left Oxford, was scraping together a life, and had written Oranges young -- I was twenty-five when it was published.   I went to a phone box -- I had no phone. She went to a phone box -- she had no phone.   I dialled the Accrington code and number as instructed, and there she was -- who needs Skype? I could see her through her voice, her form solidifying in front of me as she talked.   She was a big woman, tallish and weighing around twenty stone. Surgical stockings, flat sandals, a Crimplene dress and a nylon headscarf. She would have done her face powder (keep yourself nice), but not lipstick (fast and loose).   She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her.   But that day she was borne up on the shoulders of her own outrage. She said, 'It's the first time I've had to order a book in a false name.'   I tried to explain what I had hoped to do. I am an ambitious writer -- I don't see the point of being anything; no, not anything at all, if you have no ambition for it. 1985 wasn't the day of the memoir -- and in any case, I wasn't writing one. I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about 'experience' -- the compass of what they know -- while men write wide and bold -- the big canvas, the experiment with form. Henry James did no good when he said that Jane Austen wrote on four inches of ivory -- i.e. tiny observant minutiae. Much the same was said of Emily Dickinson and Virginia Woolf. Those things made me angry. In any case, why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined? Why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitious for literature? Ambitious for herself ?   Mrs Winterson was having none of it. She 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 -- I'll explain why later -- and so for me to have written one, and had it published, and had it win a prize . . . and be standing in a phone box giving her a lecture on literature, a polemic on feminism . . .   The pips -- more money in the slot -- and I'm thinking, as her voice goes in and out like the sea, 'Why aren't you proud of me?'   The pips -- more money in the slot -- and I'm locked out and sitting on the doorstep again. It's really cold and I've got a newspaper under my bum and I'm huddled in my duffel coat.   A woman comes by and I know her. She gives me a bag of chips. She knows what my mother is like.   Inside our house the light is on. Dad's on the night shift, so she can go to bed, but she won't sleep. She'll read the Bible all night, and when Dad comes home, he'll let me in, and he'll say nothing, and she'll say nothing, and we'll act like it's normal to leave your kid outside all night, and normal never to sleep with your husband. And normal to have two sets of false teeth, and a revolver in the duster drawer . . .   We're still on the phone in our phone boxes. She tells me that my success is from the Devil, keeper of the wrong crib. She confronts me with the fact that I have used my own name in the novel -- if it is a story, why is the main character called Jeanette?   Why?   I can't remember a time when I wasn't setting my story against hers. It was my survival from the very beginning. Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.   The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story -- of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you -- and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing.   That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.   There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.   It's why I am a writer -- I don't say 'decided' to be, or 'became'. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.   She said, 'But it's not true . . .'   Truth? This was a woman who explained the flashdash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm.   There was a terraced house in Accrington, in Lancashire -- we called those houses two-up twodown: two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs. Three of us lived together in that house for sixteen years. I told my version -- faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind.   And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges , is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it. From the Hardcover edition. Excerpted from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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