Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? [Kindle Edition]

Jeanette Winterson (Author)

Book Description

Jeanette Winterson’s novels have establishing her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life’s work to find happiness. It's a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin.

It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she'd written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother.

Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.

Editorial Reviews

From Bookforum

In her new memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson returns to the source, her grim girlhood in a sooty English industrial town in the 1960s, to tell her story more forthrightly than she has before. Aiming for narrative tidiness tends to dilute this memoir's delightfully unorthodox quality. But for the most part, this bullet of a book is charged with risk, dark mirth, and hard-won self-knowledge. —Parul Sehgal

Review

WINNER 2012 – Independent Booksellers’ Week Book Award (Adult Category)
WINNER 2012 – Stonewall Awards Writer of the Year
FINALIST 2012 – South Bank Sky Arts Awards—Literature Award
LONGLISTED 2011 – Green Carnation Prize
FINALIST 2013 – ABA Indies Choice Book Awards
FINALIST 2013 – Lambda Literary Lesbian Memoir/Biography Award


“A fierce and funny exploration of her past and of what it means to belong.”
—The Telegraph
 
“At every turn . . . her fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration.”
—The New York Times
 
“She writes in flights of poetry. . . . She is equally deft with straightforward prose, in which she makes sharp, wry observations on her myriad themes—love, sex, technology, society, art, the life and death of the spirit.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

“Blazingly good.”
—Daily Mail
 
“Arguably the finest and most hopeful memoir to emerge in many years, and, as such, it really should not be missed.”
—The Times
 
“Breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty and vigorous all at once.... Powerful.”
—Financial Times
 
“Remarkable…. Brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and a generous one.”
—The Spectator

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• File Size: 474 KB
• Print Length: 242 pages
• Page Numbers Source ISBN: B005EWDA7E
• Publisher: Grove Press (March 6, 2012)
• Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
• Language: English
• ASIN: B007D6EW8U
• Text-to-Speech: Enabled
• X-Ray: Enabled
• Lending: Not Enabled
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #18,677 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Parenting & Families
  • #9 in Books > Politics & Social Sciences > Social Sciences > Specific Demographics > Gay & Lesbian
  • #14 in Books > Gay & Lesbian > Biographies & Memoirs

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

62 of 66 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Stories are Compensatory November 8, 2011

By Andre Gerard

Format:Kindle Edition

In the October 28th Guardian, Jeanette has an essay which retells the opening of Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? The retelling is as riveting as the original. In essay and book, Winterson portrays herself as a survivor. Her childhood reads like the darker parts of some Grimms fairytale, even if her telling of the story is often lightened by empathy. Here, for instance, is a description of her often abusive, book-burning, adoptive mother.

"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."

A later passage reads:

"Babies are frightening - raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body - her own, my dad's, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mixture of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort. Then suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body. A burping, vomiting, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life."

Jeanette makes it hard not to feel some sympathy, even for twisted Mrs. Winterson.

Like many patremoirs, Winterson's matremoir is as much about the power of storytelling as it is about the parent. Good writers know how words create reality, and when writing about their parents, they are also acutely aware of how "Truth for anyone is a very complex thing." Also, as Jeanette goes on to say, "For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include." Much of the essay, and presumably the book, is about how Jeanette used books and words to survive and alter the darkness of her world. For her, "Stories are compensatory."
One last quotation from the essay, and then I'm off to try to find a copy of the book:

"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."

Andre Gerard,
Editor of Fathers: A Literary Anthology

41 of 43 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Inside the Orange January 26, 2012

By A. B. King VINE™ VOICE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Vine™ Review (What's this?)

How to start a review of Jeanette Winterson and her writing. Not an easy task. If you have read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, her autobiographical novel about her childhood and early adulthood, then you know that she is a fiery independent woman, who, incidentally, is also a lesbian. She wrote it as fiction in her twenties. Now in her fifties, she revisits that time of her life. The term brutal honesty keeps popping up, but she is not brutal. There is a profound tenderness for herself and for those in her life. What she shows us is the hard scrabble life in working class Northern England of the seventies. (Her observations on the effects of Thatcher's policies are sharp-edged.) Looking back after thirty, forty years, she seems to have found some forgiveness for the woman apparently incapable of love who adopted her.
Winterson does not write "womb to tomb" as she puts it. She circles the object of her study, her book. And we realize that this object is her heart, so tough that love is not allowed in. She pokes here and there, probing her memories, reliving brief insightful moments of her childhood. She reports to us how she could not love anyone, or even befriend a classmate, despite desperately needing someone in her young life.
And then, being Jeanette Winterson, she takes us to the present time and her search for her birth mother, which is mainly a struggle to get though the bureaucratic procedures set up to thwart adoptees from locating their birth parents.
The book ends with limited resolution, with Jeanette's heart finally opening. It is the most tender-hearted inconclusive ending I have read, probably ever. She stands with her heart exposed, bruised, torn, but beating strong.
I love this woman's writing. I do not always like her books, but this one is truly magnificent.

33 of 38 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wow, way out of my genre and so very worth it .... November 6, 2011

By iPad owner

Format:Kindle Edition|Amazon Verified Purchase

Highlighted on my kindle for the first time, a rarity, don't expect to repeat that. Laughed and cried, in just about equal measures. I would say I am not normally gripped by 'quality' writing in itself, like some people I know, where the story does not compel me but his book has it all. So impressed; by the story, the writing, the writer, the profoundness. I am calling it a perfect read and something I have learnt from.

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