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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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.
Jeanette Winterson's novels have established 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.
Jeanette Winterson's novels have established 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.
230 pages, Hardcover
First published October 25, 2011
About the author
Jeanette Winterson
113 books6,844 followersNovelist 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.
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.
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January 1, 2024
‘Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love.’
‘I have written love narratives and loss narratives,’ Winterson writes, ‘it all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother.’ Jeanette Winterson’s stern adoptive mother given to religious excess casts a long shadow over her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, the title coming from a response she gave to Winterson telling her that she is happy loving another woman, and Winterson turns her perfect prose and brilliant mind that has crafted dazzling and fantastical stories inward to examine her own history. It is a harrowing exploration of the self, reading much like a companion to her exquisite and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit but going further and exploring the harsh memories that she fictionalized because she ‘wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.’ From her harsh upbringing, her breaking away and plunging into literature and, many years later, seeking out her birth mother, Winterson chronicles her life and insights into a memoir that bombards with both humor and emotional blows to deliver a memoir that is as page turning and searingly beautiful as her best novels.
Really all I want to do is get a soapbox and shout how wonderful Winterson's work is, something anyone who knows me has likely endured lately. Her works have the right combination of soaring beauty with grit and teeth. I don't know what I can accomplish here beyond recommending her, because she is an author that has totally consumed me lately and I'm so glad of it.
‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.’
Written in real time for the latter half, we can read Winterson reading herself with the writing as a therapeutic act as much as it is a literary portrait of an undeniably amazing artist. ‘I was writing the past and discovering the future,’ she says, and her faith in the written word to heal and instruct is infectiously lovely. ‘Books have always been light and warmth to me,’ and across the whole of her memoir we see several instances where books, be it reading or writing them, become an anchor as well as a ladder to climb as an escape and a path upwards to the future. When Mrs. Winterson discovers her secret stash of books—she was forbidden from reading any book beyond the three her mother okay’d—she burns them in the backyard. “‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own,’” she says, contemplating how her attempts to collect the half-burned scraps, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’ quoting from T.S. Eliot, came alive in her own novels that seem a collection of ‘scraps uncertain of continuous narrative.�� This book dredges up the childhood that made her works possible, and the journeys of the heart that mapped the way.
As much as books were a rock for Winterson, her own works have been a comfort for many readers to come. ‘I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,’ she says, ‘When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.’
‘Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity…Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety.’
Through these words she delivered what she refers to as a ‘cover version’ of her childhood in Oranges, with the reader discovering here that many of the events were much harsher than presented in the novel, and from it her past and relationship with her mother became bestseller stories to the general public (the book opens with a phone conversation with a horrified Mrs. Winterson after the release of the book). ‘It isn’t ‘my past’, is it,’ she states, ‘I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments,’ and examines the beauty of self-mythologizing. ‘I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact,’ she repeats across the book, which is an idea that is a root to her own novels where reality and history are blended with magical realism to become a sort of fairy tale. And what better way to examine a life and turn writing into a therapy for trauma than a storytelling medium where size and shape is often ‘approximation and unstable,’ and feeling unwanted or cast out—as she was from her own home—can become a heroic act to survive.
There is also a lot of religious trauma to survive, and Winterson examines how growing up leaving presents out for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or embroidering 'the summer has ended and we are not yet saved' on her bag certainly set her apart from her peers. But it also becomes something that attempts to alienate her from herself, attempting to make her feel shame for her very natural attraction to other women. They perform a straight up exorcism on her, it's a lot. But the real kicker is seeing, once again, love not be there when it should be. Her adopted mother, then her girlfriend who renounces her. It's a tragedy, and one far more heartbreaking than was seen in novel form.
‘A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.’
Interesting as well are Winterson’s stories of her education and eventually going to Oxford. While she says she was not a great student ‘I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.’ But if being a lesbian was what had her cast out from her childhood and shunned by her neighbors, she discovered that in academia simply being a woman was a barrier. ‘Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned,’ she writes of the books taught there, ‘it was a conspiracy of ignorance.’ An English teacher tells her ‘when a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose,’’ and during this period we see the origins of many of her critiques on gendered society and misogyny start to take shape. Not only that, but she observes how much gatekeeping pushes people out, being told on her first day that she is ‘ the working-class experiment’ while her friend is the ‘Black experiment.’ Though she sees these barriers and academic circling of the wagons as a challenge to overcome and overthrow, which is also very present in her narratives.
Something Winterson does so well in this book is keep the reader firmly gripped by the waves of prose, rocking us through anecdotes and humorous observations about a life safely behind her, so that when the storm comes we are too far out at sea to turn back and must weather the maelstrom of emotions with her. ‘There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you,’ she observes, ‘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.’ The second half of this memoir is the real treasure. While more chaotic than the first, and admittedly written in real time, it chronicles the emotional journey of trying to find her birth mother. Following a breakup and a period of sorrow where ‘I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life,’ Jeanette takes on her quest, complete with companions who join along the way such as Susie Orbach, who would be her partner for many years (I screamed when it was revealed author Ali Smith told Jeanette to ‘just kiss her and see’). She learns that ‘People’s lives are less important than procedure,’ as legal hiccups thwart her and prolong the process to the point of emotional pain. But it is a beautiful tale of discovering what she needed to hear all along: ‘You were wanted, Jeanette.’ I think this beautiful sentiment makes the whole book worth reading.
‘to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater…’
The problem with real life is that it isn’t a fairy tale and there are no tidy endings. But that is also what makes it beautiful, even if tragically so. Winterson’s emotional journey is quite the tale, one that has more open ends than questions answered. I was particularly moved by her examination of a life that never was but could have been and how, even compared to the trauma of her past, she was happy to be the person she turned out to be. ‘I would rather be this me,’ she confesses, ‘than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way.’ Even to Mrs. W she observes that ‘she was a monster, but she was my monster,’ and this line has really stuck with me.
There were times when I worried it was beginning to romanticize mental health struggles and coming from a place of trauma, but right then she delivers one of the best lines in the book: ‘Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.’ She writes beautifully about how in times of mental health struggles we have to confront the creature within us, and she finds the best way for her to do so is through writing. We are all lucky to be able to observe these moments.
As much as I love her story, some of the best moments are simply Winterson talking about literature and about the ways it interacts with time and humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever underlined a book as much as this one and you will likely be finding Winterson quotes pop up in many of my reviews forever now. Here’s a taste:
This is an essential read for any Witnerson fan, but also for any lover of literature in general, and she provides an excellent list of other books to check out that were pivotal to her growth as a reader and writer. I was glad I read this directly following Oranges, and honestly this ranks with the best of her works. She has such a strong voice and the fragmentary aspects of this memoir, often told jumbled along the timeline, isn’t all that different than her novels. This is a work of startling beauty that plunges canyonous emotional depths and all I can say is Jeanette Winterson is an absolute icon. I love her, I love her works, and I can’t wait to read more.
5/5
‘The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.’
‘I have written love narratives and loss narratives,’ Winterson writes, ‘it all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother.’ Jeanette Winterson’s stern adoptive mother given to religious excess casts a long shadow over her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, the title coming from a response she gave to Winterson telling her that she is happy loving another woman, and Winterson turns her perfect prose and brilliant mind that has crafted dazzling and fantastical stories inward to examine her own history. It is a harrowing exploration of the self, reading much like a companion to her exquisite and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit but going further and exploring the harsh memories that she fictionalized because she ‘wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.’ From her harsh upbringing, her breaking away and plunging into literature and, many years later, seeking out her birth mother, Winterson chronicles her life and insights into a memoir that bombards with both humor and emotional blows to deliver a memoir that is as page turning and searingly beautiful as her best novels.
Really all I want to do is get a soapbox and shout how wonderful Winterson's work is, something anyone who knows me has likely endured lately. Her works have the right combination of soaring beauty with grit and teeth. I don't know what I can accomplish here beyond recommending her, because she is an author that has totally consumed me lately and I'm so glad of it.
‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.’
Written in real time for the latter half, we can read Winterson reading herself with the writing as a therapeutic act as much as it is a literary portrait of an undeniably amazing artist. ‘I was writing the past and discovering the future,’ she says, and her faith in the written word to heal and instruct is infectiously lovely. ‘Books have always been light and warmth to me,’ and across the whole of her memoir we see several instances where books, be it reading or writing them, become an anchor as well as a ladder to climb as an escape and a path upwards to the future. When Mrs. Winterson discovers her secret stash of books—she was forbidden from reading any book beyond the three her mother okay’d—she burns them in the backyard. “‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own,’” she says, contemplating how her attempts to collect the half-burned scraps, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’ quoting from T.S. Eliot, came alive in her own novels that seem a collection of ‘scraps uncertain of continuous narrative.�� This book dredges up the childhood that made her works possible, and the journeys of the heart that mapped the way.
’I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.’
As much as books were a rock for Winterson, her own works have been a comfort for many readers to come. ‘I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,’ she says, ‘When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.’
‘Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity…Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety.’
Through these words she delivered what she refers to as a ‘cover version’ of her childhood in Oranges, with the reader discovering here that many of the events were much harsher than presented in the novel, and from it her past and relationship with her mother became bestseller stories to the general public (the book opens with a phone conversation with a horrified Mrs. Winterson after the release of the book). ‘It isn’t ‘my past’, is it,’ she states, ‘I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments,’ and examines the beauty of self-mythologizing. ‘I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact,’ she repeats across the book, which is an idea that is a root to her own novels where reality and history are blended with magical realism to become a sort of fairy tale. And what better way to examine a life and turn writing into a therapy for trauma than a storytelling medium where size and shape is often ‘approximation and unstable,’ and feeling unwanted or cast out—as she was from her own home—can become a heroic act to survive.
There is also a lot of religious trauma to survive, and Winterson examines how growing up leaving presents out for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or embroidering 'the summer has ended and we are not yet saved' on her bag certainly set her apart from her peers. But it also becomes something that attempts to alienate her from herself, attempting to make her feel shame for her very natural attraction to other women. They perform a straight up exorcism on her, it's a lot. But the real kicker is seeing, once again, love not be there when it should be. Her adopted mother, then her girlfriend who renounces her. It's a tragedy, and one far more heartbreaking than was seen in novel form.
‘A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.’
Interesting as well are Winterson’s stories of her education and eventually going to Oxford. While she says she was not a great student ‘I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.’ But if being a lesbian was what had her cast out from her childhood and shunned by her neighbors, she discovered that in academia simply being a woman was a barrier. ‘Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned,’ she writes of the books taught there, ‘it was a conspiracy of ignorance.’ An English teacher tells her ‘when a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose,’’ and during this period we see the origins of many of her critiques on gendered society and misogyny start to take shape. Not only that, but she observes how much gatekeeping pushes people out, being told on her first day that she is ‘ the working-class experiment’ while her friend is the ‘Black experiment.’ Though she sees these barriers and academic circling of the wagons as a challenge to overcome and overthrow, which is also very present in her narratives.
’Later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you are good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.’
Something Winterson does so well in this book is keep the reader firmly gripped by the waves of prose, rocking us through anecdotes and humorous observations about a life safely behind her, so that when the storm comes we are too far out at sea to turn back and must weather the maelstrom of emotions with her. ‘There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you,’ she observes, ‘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.’ The second half of this memoir is the real treasure. While more chaotic than the first, and admittedly written in real time, it chronicles the emotional journey of trying to find her birth mother. Following a breakup and a period of sorrow where ‘I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life,’ Jeanette takes on her quest, complete with companions who join along the way such as Susie Orbach, who would be her partner for many years (I screamed when it was revealed author Ali Smith told Jeanette to ‘just kiss her and see’). She learns that ‘People’s lives are less important than procedure,’ as legal hiccups thwart her and prolong the process to the point of emotional pain. But it is a beautiful tale of discovering what she needed to hear all along: ‘You were wanted, Jeanette.’ I think this beautiful sentiment makes the whole book worth reading.
‘to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater…’
The problem with real life is that it isn’t a fairy tale and there are no tidy endings. But that is also what makes it beautiful, even if tragically so. Winterson’s emotional journey is quite the tale, one that has more open ends than questions answered. I was particularly moved by her examination of a life that never was but could have been and how, even compared to the trauma of her past, she was happy to be the person she turned out to be. ‘I would rather be this me,’ she confesses, ‘than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way.’ Even to Mrs. W she observes that ‘she was a monster, but she was my monster,’ and this line has really stuck with me.
There were times when I worried it was beginning to romanticize mental health struggles and coming from a place of trauma, but right then she delivers one of the best lines in the book: ‘Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.’ She writes beautifully about how in times of mental health struggles we have to confront the creature within us, and she finds the best way for her to do so is through writing. We are all lucky to be able to observe these moments.
As much as I love her story, some of the best moments are simply Winterson talking about literature and about the ways it interacts with time and humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever underlined a book as much as this one and you will likely be finding Winterson quotes pop up in many of my reviews forever now. Here’s a taste:
'Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.’
This is an essential read for any Witnerson fan, but also for any lover of literature in general, and she provides an excellent list of other books to check out that were pivotal to her growth as a reader and writer. I was glad I read this directly following Oranges, and honestly this ranks with the best of her works. She has such a strong voice and the fragmentary aspects of this memoir, often told jumbled along the timeline, isn’t all that different than her novels. This is a work of startling beauty that plunges canyonous emotional depths and all I can say is Jeanette Winterson is an absolute icon. I love her, I love her works, and I can’t wait to read more.
5/5
‘The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.’
October 28, 2023
It is deeply and, in a sense, necessarily fraught to review a memoir. To read something as rawly and palpably personal as this book is to recognize you are being invited into a perilous kind of intimacy. There is no way to see into the most vulnerable parts of someone’s life and leave unchanged.
I read this book at a time when I was doing so much remembering, and perhaps I would have loved it a great deal less if I weren’t. Remembering is the ripping of something wide open—like a ribcage—until every memory becomes a wound. It was comforting to stumble into this book and know someone else has the words for it.
In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson reaches deeply into a difficult and uniquely vulnerable space of a struggle—a struggle with the past, with the self, with language. The questions thrusting up from the bottom of her memoir are not easy to confront: How do you render the violent, the haunting, the wounding, and the severe without reproducing the same conditions of pain—in yourself and in others? How do you encompass, through the act of writing, all the ugly, painful, and in many ways unresolvable complexities, silences, and indeterminacies of the past?
How do you return, and how do you piece together an aftermath?
To do so requires an act of radical openness. And here is a writer of astonishing sincerity. Winterson is not striving for subtlety, and she refuses to compose herself. The language is confrontational, disruptive, irreverent. It cannot be handed over to a simplicity of form which cannot contain it. It would collapse under the weight of cumulative remembrance. The writer's battle for coherence therefore becomes a battle against coherence.
Winterson strips her language of convention to lay bare her internal life to the reader. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is released from the trappings of a straightforward narrative. It is, instead, hammered into fragments. In chapters that play like vignettes, each leaking into the other, we trace the unstoppable fractures of Winterson’s childhood as they spread from her past to her present. We bear witness to Winterson as she grows up queer, working class, and a woman in a traumatic household in which rupture, disjunction, and displacement are habitual occurrences. The narrative escapes linear time, and the past becomes present becomes an impossible place, a nowhere and an everywhere. And, two-thirds of the way through, it breaks down under the weight of compounded trauma. The self—fragmented—and the form—unmoored—in search of embodiment. “Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place,” Winterson writes. “Where are you?”
Winterson has a deft hand with loss, the contradictory, and its relation to language. When she writes about the impossibility of origins, the terrible desire for love, and the ubiquitous grief that is the space between people who are incomprehensible to one another—she reveals the potent work of language, which rises out of all kinds of silences, to keep us—literally—alive. “I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights,” she writes, “I had language.” This was enough.
Remembering is never pretty, only crude and hideous. It is often about loss. It’s almost always about love. Through all the layers of large and small violences emerges a writer who is not only capable of love but is possessed by a fever for it. Winterson emphasizes her inability to love, but this, too, betrays a hint of its opposite: a wild, reckless, undrainable capacity for love which is rigged only by her terror of losing it. The loss of love in pain. Winterson knows it is impossible to tell a story about loss without ending up back at love. It’s just as difficult to talk about love without running into the specter of loss. This isn’t an aberration; there is no right or wrong way to hold love and loss inside you.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? does not so much end as simply trail off into silence. The last line reads, “I have no idea what happens next.” In the end, we spend ourselves in our desperation for a language to hold us.
I read this book at a time when I was doing so much remembering, and perhaps I would have loved it a great deal less if I weren’t. Remembering is the ripping of something wide open—like a ribcage—until every memory becomes a wound. It was comforting to stumble into this book and know someone else has the words for it.
In Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Winterson reaches deeply into a difficult and uniquely vulnerable space of a struggle—a struggle with the past, with the self, with language. The questions thrusting up from the bottom of her memoir are not easy to confront: How do you render the violent, the haunting, the wounding, and the severe without reproducing the same conditions of pain—in yourself and in others? How do you encompass, through the act of writing, all the ugly, painful, and in many ways unresolvable complexities, silences, and indeterminacies of the past?
How do you return, and how do you piece together an aftermath?
To do so requires an act of radical openness. And here is a writer of astonishing sincerity. Winterson is not striving for subtlety, and she refuses to compose herself. The language is confrontational, disruptive, irreverent. It cannot be handed over to a simplicity of form which cannot contain it. It would collapse under the weight of cumulative remembrance. The writer's battle for coherence therefore becomes a battle against coherence.
Winterson strips her language of convention to lay bare her internal life to the reader. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is released from the trappings of a straightforward narrative. It is, instead, hammered into fragments. In chapters that play like vignettes, each leaking into the other, we trace the unstoppable fractures of Winterson’s childhood as they spread from her past to her present. We bear witness to Winterson as she grows up queer, working class, and a woman in a traumatic household in which rupture, disjunction, and displacement are habitual occurrences. The narrative escapes linear time, and the past becomes present becomes an impossible place, a nowhere and an everywhere. And, two-thirds of the way through, it breaks down under the weight of compounded trauma. The self—fragmented—and the form—unmoored—in search of embodiment. “Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place,” Winterson writes. “Where are you?”
Winterson has a deft hand with loss, the contradictory, and its relation to language. When she writes about the impossibility of origins, the terrible desire for love, and the ubiquitous grief that is the space between people who are incomprehensible to one another—she reveals the potent work of language, which rises out of all kinds of silences, to keep us—literally—alive. “I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights,” she writes, “I had language.” This was enough.
Remembering is never pretty, only crude and hideous. It is often about loss. It’s almost always about love. Through all the layers of large and small violences emerges a writer who is not only capable of love but is possessed by a fever for it. Winterson emphasizes her inability to love, but this, too, betrays a hint of its opposite: a wild, reckless, undrainable capacity for love which is rigged only by her terror of losing it. The loss of love in pain. Winterson knows it is impossible to tell a story about loss without ending up back at love. It’s just as difficult to talk about love without running into the specter of loss. This isn’t an aberration; there is no right or wrong way to hold love and loss inside you.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? does not so much end as simply trail off into silence. The last line reads, “I have no idea what happens next.” In the end, we spend ourselves in our desperation for a language to hold us.
May 6, 2015
If you read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit then this just reads like an early version before the editor said to the author, "You can't write that, no one will believe you." The cliché goes that truth is stranger than fiction and this book is definitely stranger than Oranges. It is hard, for instance, to believe that the author, as an adult, never addressed her mother as anything but Mrs. Winterson.
Small personal anecdote that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book other than it's a bit about Winterson's famous girlfriend who was much celebrated and made a lot of money from her book on fat and feminism, but there you go, when did my reviews ever stick to the point?
Years ago, having quite a lot of money and not much sense of what to spend it on I decided physical perfection was all and took myself off to a health farm, or 'spa', in Malta to lose some weight and tone up. It was a sleazy dump with hardly any facilities and was in fact a money-laundering operation for a body-building company in the UK that mostly sold steroids. There weren't many clients and all of us were there to lose weight which bewildered the few staff who didn't seem to know what to do with us other than to feed us very little and tell us to swim in the algae-green pool. In other words, a perfect place to hide out. The author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue was there, the girlfriend of Jeanette Winterson. Not such a feminist issue, eh?
Can you trust any author to be who they say they are or is it all just for effect? I guess so long as the money keeps rolling in its all 'true', and when the money stops - maybe that's time for a tell-all autobiography with tv interviews revealing all the psychological problems that stopped the author from telling the truth in the first place. I'm thinking now of Orbach, but it applies to any author, maybe even Winterson. (If a tell-all doesn't bring the cash in and the fame back, then there's always reality tv).
Edited because I was apparently very insulting with two words, so I took them out. What a laugh to complain about that though!
Small personal anecdote that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book other than it's a bit about Winterson's famous girlfriend who was much celebrated and made a lot of money from her book on fat and feminism, but there you go, when did my reviews ever stick to the point?
Years ago, having quite a lot of money and not much sense of what to spend it on I decided physical perfection was all and took myself off to a health farm, or 'spa', in Malta to lose some weight and tone up. It was a sleazy dump with hardly any facilities and was in fact a money-laundering operation for a body-building company in the UK that mostly sold steroids. There weren't many clients and all of us were there to lose weight which bewildered the few staff who didn't seem to know what to do with us other than to feed us very little and tell us to swim in the algae-green pool. In other words, a perfect place to hide out. The author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue was there, the girlfriend of Jeanette Winterson. Not such a feminist issue, eh?
Can you trust any author to be who they say they are or is it all just for effect? I guess so long as the money keeps rolling in its all 'true', and when the money stops - maybe that's time for a tell-all autobiography with tv interviews revealing all the psychological problems that stopped the author from telling the truth in the first place. I'm thinking now of Orbach, but it applies to any author, maybe even Winterson. (If a tell-all doesn't bring the cash in and the fame back, then there's always reality tv).
Edited because I was apparently very insulting with two words, so I took them out. What a laugh to complain about that though!
May 28, 2017
Books mean a great deal to me. Are you surprised to hear me say this? I think not. As a consequence, I really enjoy reading books about people who really enjoy books. It’s just how these things work. And Jeanette Winterson really, really, likes books. When she had nothing, she always had her books: they gave her courage and strength. This is a book for those that love reading and writing; this is a book for those that understand why someone would spend their entire life doing such things: it is a book that speaks directly to the book lover.
Jeannette had a very cold childhood; her mother was a depressive who had a very warped mind set. She was devoutly religious but rather than seeing religion as a means of spreading love and understanding, she saw it as a way to chastise people. She was a misanthrope, a hater of mankind. When she looked at society all she saw was a wretched cusp of civilisation that needed to be punished. It was unworthy of God’s teachings, of the word of the Bible. And she was obsessed with the Bible, reading it multiple times each year. She attempted to limit her daughter’s faculties by not letting her read beyond its pages.
So Jeanette read in private, hiding her collection of books under her bed. One day her mother found them and burnt them all in the back garden. She destroyed the books of Jeanette’s youth, but she couldn’t destroy her. Jeanette began to learn literature by heart because that could never be taken away from her, and then she set out to write her own story. This book would become her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which, if you didn’t already know, went on to win numerous literary awards along with establishing Winterson as a successful writer.
Her writing is highly autobiographical, drawing on her own experiences to create her narratives. Oranges focuses much on sexuality, gender and the restrictions of religious belief. This, on the other hand, centralises the relationship between Jeanette and her mother within the narrative. It builds on the themes established in Oranges and addresses them in a much more intelligent voice. Twenty-five years have passed in between books, and her mother has died since, and as a result Winterson addresses the themes with more clarity and retrospective wisdom.
She both hated and loved her mother. Jeanette was adopted, and she has always felt unwanted and incapable of accepting love: she has always felt empty inside. The coldness of her adoptive mother has been to blame for much of this, but her actions created the writer. Without them, Winterson would never have established her literary voice. She would never have read so widely and so voraciously and set her on the path to finding her voice. She knows exactly what her mother was to her:
“She was a monster, but she was my monster.”
So this is a deeply personal account about Winterson’s life; it is revealing and powerful. I admire her courage to not only write such fiction, but to impart so much of herself to her readers. It’s very brave writing, highly successful too.
Jeannette had a very cold childhood; her mother was a depressive who had a very warped mind set. She was devoutly religious but rather than seeing religion as a means of spreading love and understanding, she saw it as a way to chastise people. She was a misanthrope, a hater of mankind. When she looked at society all she saw was a wretched cusp of civilisation that needed to be punished. It was unworthy of God’s teachings, of the word of the Bible. And she was obsessed with the Bible, reading it multiple times each year. She attempted to limit her daughter’s faculties by not letting her read beyond its pages.
So Jeanette read in private, hiding her collection of books under her bed. One day her mother found them and burnt them all in the back garden. She destroyed the books of Jeanette’s youth, but she couldn’t destroy her. Jeanette began to learn literature by heart because that could never be taken away from her, and then she set out to write her own story. This book would become her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit which, if you didn’t already know, went on to win numerous literary awards along with establishing Winterson as a successful writer.
Her writing is highly autobiographical, drawing on her own experiences to create her narratives. Oranges focuses much on sexuality, gender and the restrictions of religious belief. This, on the other hand, centralises the relationship between Jeanette and her mother within the narrative. It builds on the themes established in Oranges and addresses them in a much more intelligent voice. Twenty-five years have passed in between books, and her mother has died since, and as a result Winterson addresses the themes with more clarity and retrospective wisdom.
She both hated and loved her mother. Jeanette was adopted, and she has always felt unwanted and incapable of accepting love: she has always felt empty inside. The coldness of her adoptive mother has been to blame for much of this, but her actions created the writer. Without them, Winterson would never have established her literary voice. She would never have read so widely and so voraciously and set her on the path to finding her voice. She knows exactly what her mother was to her:
“She was a monster, but she was my monster.”
So this is a deeply personal account about Winterson’s life; it is revealing and powerful. I admire her courage to not only write such fiction, but to impart so much of herself to her readers. It’s very brave writing, highly successful too.
December 19, 2022
Despite the humour and the occasional glimmer of hope, there were times when I found this book almost too hard to read. I imagine writing about it will prove equally traumatising, so I'll say only that this memoir was superbly written, and heartbreakingly honest, and will remain with me for a very long time.
October 10, 2017
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 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.
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 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.
April 20, 2020
Resolute and unsentimental, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal reckons with the legacy of childhood neglect. In the memoir’s first part Jeanette Winterson reflects on her experience of growing up gay in Accrington, England, inside the household of her adoptive mother, a Pentecostal fanatic prone to abusive tendencies. In matter-of-fact prose, with great wit, the author confronts the harrowing conditions of her childhood; narrates the social history of her working-class hometown; and recounts how her local library helped inspire her to seek a better life. The memoir’s second part, by contrast, follows the author in the present as she searches for her biological mother, with the help of her partner. Compared to the first, it understandably feels less polished and more enmeshed in uncertainty. Both sections are characterized by fragmented, nonlinear narratives, a choice explained at length toward the book’s end, and both paint a surprisingly sympathetic portrait of the woman the author only can call “Mrs. Winterson,” not “Mum.” Winterson’s resilience is remarkable, her craft exceptional, and Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal easily is one of the most moving memoirs I’ve read.
May 18, 2020
This is a remarkable memoir, honest and very moving; beautifully written and there is a passion for reading and books that runs through it. Winterson describes books as her hearth and home and I know exactly what she means. As well as being a moving memoir, it is a memoir that will resonate with every lover of books. This is also a follow up from the fictionalised version of Winterson’s childhood: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. The first half of the book outlines the real story of Winterson’s childhood, including the less palatable parts. The second half takes a few snapshots from her life, her time at university and her breakdown at the end of a relationship: the descriptions of the breakdown are very painful and difficult to read. The last part of the memoir relates to Winterson’s search for her birth mother and what happened when she found her.
Some parts of this certainly resonated with me as I was also brought up in an Elim Pentecostal Church and recognised some of the character traits and apocalyptic beliefs (and the exorcism). The telling title comes from the moment Winterson told her mother she was leaving home because she was in love with a girl and was happy. Her mother’s response was “Why be happy when you could be normal.” Winterson’s mother (throughout referred to as Mrs Winterson) is a monstrous character, regularly locking her daughter in the coal shed or locking her out of the house so she had to sit on the doorstep. “Love was not an emotion. It was a bomb site between us.” Winterson used to hide the books she bought under her mattress, when her mother found them, she burnt them. Another thing that really resonates with readers.
Winterson’s adventures in the library are interesting as she discovers new authors and there are touches of humour throughout. “The one good thing about being shut in a coal hole is that it prompts reflection.” The passages relating to Winterson’s breakdown are difficult to read, but the presence of Susie Orbach as Winterson begins a relationship adds some light and a fixed point. Winterson also manages throughout to show even her mother as human and severely damaged herself as well as the monster she undoubtedly was. Winterson is very honest about herself:
“I have big problems around home, making homes, making homes with someone.”
Love, loss and longing are central to her writing as is adoption:
“Adoption drops you into the story after it has started. 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.”
This is a memoir well worth reading and has reminded me I need to read more by Jeanette Winterson
Some parts of this certainly resonated with me as I was also brought up in an Elim Pentecostal Church and recognised some of the character traits and apocalyptic beliefs (and the exorcism). The telling title comes from the moment Winterson told her mother she was leaving home because she was in love with a girl and was happy. Her mother’s response was “Why be happy when you could be normal.” Winterson’s mother (throughout referred to as Mrs Winterson) is a monstrous character, regularly locking her daughter in the coal shed or locking her out of the house so she had to sit on the doorstep. “Love was not an emotion. It was a bomb site between us.” Winterson used to hide the books she bought under her mattress, when her mother found them, she burnt them. Another thing that really resonates with readers.
Winterson’s adventures in the library are interesting as she discovers new authors and there are touches of humour throughout. “The one good thing about being shut in a coal hole is that it prompts reflection.” The passages relating to Winterson’s breakdown are difficult to read, but the presence of Susie Orbach as Winterson begins a relationship adds some light and a fixed point. Winterson also manages throughout to show even her mother as human and severely damaged herself as well as the monster she undoubtedly was. Winterson is very honest about herself:
“I have big problems around home, making homes, making homes with someone.”
Love, loss and longing are central to her writing as is adoption:
“Adoption drops you into the story after it has started. 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.”
This is a memoir well worth reading and has reminded me I need to read more by Jeanette Winterson
November 19, 2011
This book came in the mail today, I opened the package, opened the book and looked at a few pages randomly, started reading, and about half an hour later turned back to the beginning so I could start reading it properly. That's as good a star ranking as anything, I think.
This book isn't really a memoir, (but then again, if you expect linear storytelling from Jeanette Winterson....): it skips twenty-five years of her life in an "Intermission" and the end is so open-ended a great breeze might come through (there's a lot about doors and thresholds, being locked out and being let in, in this book). What made it amazing for me is the power, the fire, of Winterson's descriptions of reading, her personal, visceral attachment to books. I imagine this is being sold as the dark-side-of-the-moon companion to Oranges, Winterson's first, most realistic and most openly autobiographical novel; indeed, my British edition of the book has a little round orange sticker declaring it to be "BY THE AUTHOR OF ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT". Clever-clever, marketing department.
But this book is the story of what didn't get into the story of Oranges: raggedy, stitched-together, with great gaping absences, spurts of language and then painful silences, aporia, lacunae. Winterson called it the "backstory" of Oranges on her blog, which fits: it's the backstage story, the back of the tapestry, the story of how she got dragged back to what she describes as the central "wound" of her life, being given up for adoption. Oranges was a self-made origin myth; this goes back further, to the origin of that origin myth, and while the tale is still self-made, one of its larger points is how made we are by what happens to us, who brings us up, who nurtures us. Our background -- which she brings to the fore of her story.
This book is much more angry than Oranges (which had a kind of deliberately willed, commanded, courage and optimism which is part of Winterson's own defiant makeup; she charmingly explains the difference between her and her adopted mother in their choice of favourite hymns: hers is "Cheer Up Ye Saints of God," Mrs Winterson's is "God Has Blotted Them Out"). Winterson writes about the blighting of the industrial North of England -- her description of Manchester as the country's "engine" is stunning -- and Thatcherism, the tutor who said to her at Oxford, "You are the working-class experiment" (her best friend got "You are the black experiment"), and there's a striking paragraph-long explosion at cultural critics who called her "arrogant" after her books were published, who didn't understand that for a working-class girl daring to dream of being an author, that wasn't arrogance, it was "politics." Again from her blog:
Shelagh Delaney, writer of A Taste of Honey, was so good, and she didn’t get the support she needed to develop. She was a working class girl, before feminism, living in Salford, and she had incredible talent. She should have been up there in the theatre along with Osborne and Pinter. But although she got her break, she didn’t get the crucial follow-up. She was born in 1939 and wrote A Taste of Honey as her first play when she was about 20. She co-wrote the movie with Tony Richardson and it won everything at Cannes.
Her second play faltered, and she went into film work. There was so much more she could have done and how amazing to see a woman at the centre of the Kitchen Sink Realism as well as all those male heroes…
We have to look after people. Space, time, encouragement, there is no such thing as the lone genius or the lone talent.
At the end of the book, Winterson meets her biological mother and half-brother, and a heap of other relations, and thinks sadly how intelligent they all are, how they're trying to read and study and learn on their own just as she did; and she beautifully describes being nurtured by a number of different women, from the female librarian who gave her a spare room to her present partner, Susie Orbach (warning: that interview will make you want to kick Aida Edemariam in the shins). A refrain in the book is about want -- You were wanted, Jeanette -- how her birth mother wanted but couldn't keep her, and "Mrs Winterson" had her but didn't want her. But, as Julie Myerson said:
Of course, one of the book's queasiest ironies – and one you sense Winterson is fully aware of – is that it was Mrs Winterson who made her into a writer. By attempting to stunt her daughter's emotional and imaginative growth with fear and religion, she succeeded in doing the exact opposite. She created someone who learned to live in her head, and to love, trust and remember words: "Fuck it, I can write my own," was young Jeanette's thought as she watched her beloved books burn.
Excerpt from the book in the Grauniad - this is what made me buy it from Amazon.co.uk because I couldn't wait to read it. I linked it to nearly every one of my friends. Its ending deserves to be quoted in full:
I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. I began to memorise texts. We had always memorised long chunks of the Bible, and it seems that people in oral traditions have better memories than those who rely on printed text. The rhythm and image of poetry make it easier to recall than prose, easier to chant. But I needed prose too, and so I made my own concise versions of 19th-century novels – going for the talismanic, not worrying much about the plot. I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights. I had language.
....The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away. And standing over the smouldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. "Fuck it," I thought, "I can write my own."
And she did.
This book isn't really a memoir, (but then again, if you expect linear storytelling from Jeanette Winterson....): it skips twenty-five years of her life in an "Intermission" and the end is so open-ended a great breeze might come through (there's a lot about doors and thresholds, being locked out and being let in, in this book). What made it amazing for me is the power, the fire, of Winterson's descriptions of reading, her personal, visceral attachment to books. I imagine this is being sold as the dark-side-of-the-moon companion to Oranges, Winterson's first, most realistic and most openly autobiographical novel; indeed, my British edition of the book has a little round orange sticker declaring it to be "BY THE AUTHOR OF ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT". Clever-clever, marketing department.
But this book is the story of what didn't get into the story of Oranges: raggedy, stitched-together, with great gaping absences, spurts of language and then painful silences, aporia, lacunae. Winterson called it the "backstory" of Oranges on her blog, which fits: it's the backstage story, the back of the tapestry, the story of how she got dragged back to what she describes as the central "wound" of her life, being given up for adoption. Oranges was a self-made origin myth; this goes back further, to the origin of that origin myth, and while the tale is still self-made, one of its larger points is how made we are by what happens to us, who brings us up, who nurtures us. Our background -- which she brings to the fore of her story.
This book is much more angry than Oranges (which had a kind of deliberately willed, commanded, courage and optimism which is part of Winterson's own defiant makeup; she charmingly explains the difference between her and her adopted mother in their choice of favourite hymns: hers is "Cheer Up Ye Saints of God," Mrs Winterson's is "God Has Blotted Them Out"). Winterson writes about the blighting of the industrial North of England -- her description of Manchester as the country's "engine" is stunning -- and Thatcherism, the tutor who said to her at Oxford, "You are the working-class experiment" (her best friend got "You are the black experiment"), and there's a striking paragraph-long explosion at cultural critics who called her "arrogant" after her books were published, who didn't understand that for a working-class girl daring to dream of being an author, that wasn't arrogance, it was "politics." Again from her blog:
Shelagh Delaney, writer of A Taste of Honey, was so good, and she didn’t get the support she needed to develop. She was a working class girl, before feminism, living in Salford, and she had incredible talent. She should have been up there in the theatre along with Osborne and Pinter. But although she got her break, she didn’t get the crucial follow-up. She was born in 1939 and wrote A Taste of Honey as her first play when she was about 20. She co-wrote the movie with Tony Richardson and it won everything at Cannes.
Her second play faltered, and she went into film work. There was so much more she could have done and how amazing to see a woman at the centre of the Kitchen Sink Realism as well as all those male heroes…
We have to look after people. Space, time, encouragement, there is no such thing as the lone genius or the lone talent.
At the end of the book, Winterson meets her biological mother and half-brother, and a heap of other relations, and thinks sadly how intelligent they all are, how they're trying to read and study and learn on their own just as she did; and she beautifully describes being nurtured by a number of different women, from the female librarian who gave her a spare room to her present partner, Susie Orbach (warning: that interview will make you want to kick Aida Edemariam in the shins). A refrain in the book is about want -- You were wanted, Jeanette -- how her birth mother wanted but couldn't keep her, and "Mrs Winterson" had her but didn't want her. But, as Julie Myerson said:
Of course, one of the book's queasiest ironies – and one you sense Winterson is fully aware of – is that it was Mrs Winterson who made her into a writer. By attempting to stunt her daughter's emotional and imaginative growth with fear and religion, she succeeded in doing the exact opposite. She created someone who learned to live in her head, and to love, trust and remember words: "Fuck it, I can write my own," was young Jeanette's thought as she watched her beloved books burn.
Excerpt from the book in the Grauniad - this is what made me buy it from Amazon.co.uk because I couldn't wait to read it. I linked it to nearly every one of my friends. Its ending deserves to be quoted in full:
I realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. I began to memorise texts. We had always memorised long chunks of the Bible, and it seems that people in oral traditions have better memories than those who rely on printed text. The rhythm and image of poetry make it easier to recall than prose, easier to chant. But I needed prose too, and so I made my own concise versions of 19th-century novels – going for the talismanic, not worrying much about the plot. I had lines inside me – a string of guiding lights. I had language.
....The books had gone, but they were objects; what they held could not be so easily destroyed. What they held was already inside me, and together we would get away. And standing over the smouldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood that there was something else I could do. "Fuck it," I thought, "I can write my own."
And she did.
November 3, 2019
This is a book that will remain in my memory and soul forever... I had absolutely no idea what I was going to read, I took this book by chance thinking it was a woman’s story and the discovery of Winterson's homosexuality. Instead this book is shocking, it's a bomb, it enters in your bowels leaving the reader ( to me surely) often unable to go on the reading for the trauma and psychological violence written there. I didn’t even know I would be a witness reading of a woman with a very serious psychiatric form that some crazies worse than this lady are gonna give her a baby for adoption.
This is a chilling story of a survival, of Jeanette struggling with daily conditions of acute mental suffering and continuous violents and unspeakable mystical psychotic crisis of her mother. The aspect of the Janette's homosexuality it is not central in the narrative,it is central the unfortunately fractured growth in those fundamental aspects that are the security of parental love and the care of the child in her most elementary needs. Nothing will got this child, except a material cure almost enough to survive, but so much will receive in neglect, not only from the maternal side but also from the father... who will be " ideologically castrated" by his wife and relegated to an appearance little more than existing but not incident in the life of "family".
A ferocious reading, full of wonderful references to English literature and not only ; often the episodes reported and bombarded by so many old biblical passages are given in the eyes of the reader also with in a " almost tragic and ironic"way and I was so ashamed, but I also laughed at the sentences reported by Mrs Winterson ( the adoptive mother) and so called by Jeanette.
Jeanette is saved thanks to her love for literature and the grace of an encounter, with the literature teacher who will give her that fundamental help to be accepted at the university.
What shocked me the most, are the biblical passages of the Old Testament which are reported and given with wickedness by the mother, wickedness she was but the only way for this woman to communicate with this daughter, wanted but then rejected and then desired and hated at the same time.
Why did Jeanette Winterson write this book even though she later met her biological mother? In this constant mention of the adoptive mother.... while vomiting all the pain and laceration on her, what does she crave? The possibility that she would have wished for a small shred of love in this land of terror?
Salvador Dalì- The Persistence of Memory
Questo è un libro che mi rimarrà nella memoria e nell' anima per per sempre... io non avevo assolutamente idea di cosa stavo per leggere, ho preso questo libro un pò per caso pensando che fosse il racconto di una donna e la scoperta della sua omosessualità. Invece questo libro è sconvolgente, è una bomba, di entra nelle viscere lasciando al lettore ( a me sicuramente) spesso incapace di andare avanti nella lettura a causa dei traumi e violenze psicologiche ivi raccontate. Non sapevo neanche sarei stata testimone nella lettura di una donna con una gravissima forma psichiatrica ( ora ditemi come possibile che, neanche a farlo apposta, le trovi tutte io queste condizioni nei libri scelti come dileggio!!) a cui dei pazzi peggio di lei, daranno in adozione una bimba. Questa non è altro che la storia agghiacciante di una sopravvivenza, di Jeanette alle prese con condizioni quotidiane di acuta sofferenza mentale e continue violente inenarrabili nate da crisi psicotiche mistiche della madre. L'aspetto dell'omosessualità di Janette e si e no centrale nella narrazione, è centrale la crescita purtroppo fratturata in quegli aspetti caposaldi che sono la sicurezza dell'amore genitoriale e la cura del figlio nelle sue esigenze piu' elementari. Nulla avrà questa bambina, se non una cura materiale quasi sufficiente per sopravvivere, ma tanto riceverà in negligenza non solo da parte materna ma anche dal padre.... che verrà " ideologicamente castrato" dalla moglie e quini relegato a una comparsa poco piu che esistente ma non incidente nella vita"di famiglia". Una lettura feroce, pienissima di meravigliosi riferimenti alla letteratura inglese e non solo....spesso gli episodi riportati e infarciti da tantissimi passi biblici vengono dati agli occhi del lettore anche con una possibilità di lettura " quasi tragicomica" e mi sono vergognata tanto, ma ho anche riso per le frasi riportate di Mrs Winterson ( la madre adottiva) e così chiamata da Jeanette.
Jeanette si salva grazie all'amore per la letteratura e la grazia di un incontro, con la professoressa di lettere che le darà quell' aiuto fondamentale per venire accettata all'università.
Quello che mi inquieta di piu' sono i passi biblici dell' antico testamento riportati e detti con malvagità dalla madre, . una malvagità che altro non era che unico modo per questa donna di comunicare con la figlia, voluta ma poi rifiutata ma allo spesso tempo desiderata. Perchè la Winterson ha scritto questo libro nonostante abbia poi conosciuto la madre biologica? in questo suo continuo nominare la madre adottiva.... pur vomitandole addosso tutto il dolore e lacerazione vissuti, cosa brama? la possibilità che comunque avrebbe desiderato un briciolo di amore in questa landa di terrore?
This is a chilling story of a survival, of Jeanette struggling with daily conditions of acute mental suffering and continuous violents and unspeakable mystical psychotic crisis of her mother. The aspect of the Janette's homosexuality it is not central in the narrative,it is central the unfortunately fractured growth in those fundamental aspects that are the security of parental love and the care of the child in her most elementary needs. Nothing will got this child, except a material cure almost enough to survive, but so much will receive in neglect, not only from the maternal side but also from the father... who will be " ideologically castrated" by his wife and relegated to an appearance little more than existing but not incident in the life of "family".
A ferocious reading, full of wonderful references to English literature and not only ; often the episodes reported and bombarded by so many old biblical passages are given in the eyes of the reader also with in a " almost tragic and ironic"way and I was so ashamed, but I also laughed at the sentences reported by Mrs Winterson ( the adoptive mother) and so called by Jeanette.
Jeanette is saved thanks to her love for literature and the grace of an encounter, with the literature teacher who will give her that fundamental help to be accepted at the university.
What shocked me the most, are the biblical passages of the Old Testament which are reported and given with wickedness by the mother, wickedness she was but the only way for this woman to communicate with this daughter, wanted but then rejected and then desired and hated at the same time.
Why did Jeanette Winterson write this book even though she later met her biological mother? In this constant mention of the adoptive mother.... while vomiting all the pain and laceration on her, what does she crave? The possibility that she would have wished for a small shred of love in this land of terror?
Salvador Dalì- The Persistence of Memory
Questo è un libro che mi rimarrà nella memoria e nell' anima per per sempre... io non avevo assolutamente idea di cosa stavo per leggere, ho preso questo libro un pò per caso pensando che fosse il racconto di una donna e la scoperta della sua omosessualità. Invece questo libro è sconvolgente, è una bomba, di entra nelle viscere lasciando al lettore ( a me sicuramente) spesso incapace di andare avanti nella lettura a causa dei traumi e violenze psicologiche ivi raccontate. Non sapevo neanche sarei stata testimone nella lettura di una donna con una gravissima forma psichiatrica ( ora ditemi come possibile che, neanche a farlo apposta, le trovi tutte io queste condizioni nei libri scelti come dileggio!!) a cui dei pazzi peggio di lei, daranno in adozione una bimba. Questa non è altro che la storia agghiacciante di una sopravvivenza, di Jeanette alle prese con condizioni quotidiane di acuta sofferenza mentale e continue violente inenarrabili nate da crisi psicotiche mistiche della madre. L'aspetto dell'omosessualità di Janette e si e no centrale nella narrazione, è centrale la crescita purtroppo fratturata in quegli aspetti caposaldi che sono la sicurezza dell'amore genitoriale e la cura del figlio nelle sue esigenze piu' elementari. Nulla avrà questa bambina, se non una cura materiale quasi sufficiente per sopravvivere, ma tanto riceverà in negligenza non solo da parte materna ma anche dal padre.... che verrà " ideologicamente castrato" dalla moglie e quini relegato a una comparsa poco piu che esistente ma non incidente nella vita"di famiglia". Una lettura feroce, pienissima di meravigliosi riferimenti alla letteratura inglese e non solo....spesso gli episodi riportati e infarciti da tantissimi passi biblici vengono dati agli occhi del lettore anche con una possibilità di lettura " quasi tragicomica" e mi sono vergognata tanto, ma ho anche riso per le frasi riportate di Mrs Winterson ( la madre adottiva) e così chiamata da Jeanette.
Jeanette si salva grazie all'amore per la letteratura e la grazia di un incontro, con la professoressa di lettere che le darà quell' aiuto fondamentale per venire accettata all'università.
Quello che mi inquieta di piu' sono i passi biblici dell' antico testamento riportati e detti con malvagità dalla madre, . una malvagità che altro non era che unico modo per questa donna di comunicare con la figlia, voluta ma poi rifiutata ma allo spesso tempo desiderata. Perchè la Winterson ha scritto questo libro nonostante abbia poi conosciuto la madre biologica? in questo suo continuo nominare la madre adottiva.... pur vomitandole addosso tutto il dolore e lacerazione vissuti, cosa brama? la possibilità che comunque avrebbe desiderato un briciolo di amore in questa landa di terrore?
November 3, 2014
This is about a girl who was adopted by a religious lunatic and who realised she was a lesbian.
Yes.
Uh oh.
It's a squirmy, maddening, elusive, full-frontal, raging, psychonewagebabbly, moving, heartfelt, essential memoir. I was going to be cute and say that in 1969 The Beatles decided to release an album on which there were no overdubs, no studio tricks at all, but the resulting album Let It Be broke its own rule by containing overdubbed strings & harps & choruses; so many years later Paul McCartney fixed this dishonesty by producing a new version, called Let It Be…Naked, which really is a no-overdub live-in-the-studio Beatles album - the truth at last! And I was going to say that Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is Let It Be and Why Be Happy when you Could be Normal? is Let it Be…Naked. But it’s not true.
(analogy does not hold water, says GR reviewer)
Yes, you find out that in Oranges (and I’m thinking that you need to have seen the tv series or read the book first, both recommended, so no hardship) a lot of punches were pulled; but no, the whole picture is still not revealed, and JW uses the full panoply of 32 track overdubbing, phasing, extreme stereo panning, hotshot studio musicians, the works, in her new version of the old story of her crazy childhood. It’s not a simple tale.
In fact it’s like Hilary Mantel’s frankly weird memoir Giving up the Ghost and even Bob Dylan’s glorious Chronicles – certain parts of the lives in question are given the full treatment, the significant bits, and others are blanked, bits which the reader might object to – hey, what about this thing and that thing and whyja do that and what happened here? Memoirs are for readers who can contain their irritation at being fed only what the author wants them to be fed. We are often left panting with our tongues lolling and whining. Poor memoir readers! That’s the name of the game.
So, Oranges is great but the other two JW novels I read (The Passion and Sexing the Cherry) each earned two meagre stars – fully of gorgeous paragraphs they may be, but I could not make head nor tail of them. This has happened to me before. I love early Joni Mitchell, but then she took a bad turn and produced Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter – mama mia! Horrible stuff! (Oh - you love those albums? Sorry!)
(this is where the rot set in)
So I’m not a JW fan, except that she occasionally appears on political discussion shows on the BBC, and I LOVE hearing her, she cuts through the nonsense like laser surgery.
She was a monster, but she was my monster.
JW says this about her adoptive mother who she consistently refers to as “Mrs Winterson”. This mother was physically huge and a religious fruitcake, a key member of an evangelical sect who had strict rules about everything. So on top of the dire poverty of working class England in the 60s and 70s, you had another whole set of deprivations imposed. However, here’s JW on the subject of growing up in a crazy Christian cult :
It is hard to understand the contradictions unless you have lived them : the camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do – then set this against the cruelty of dogma, the miserable rigidity of no drink, no fags, no sex (or if you were married as little sex as possible), no going to the pictures, no reading anything except devotional literature, no fancy clothes (not that we could afford them), no dancing…no pop music, no card games, no pubs. TV was OK but not on Sundays. On Sundays you covered the set with a cloth.
Here’s the young JW walking through town (Accrington) with her mother:
We went past Woolworths – “A Den of Vice”. Past Marks and Spencer’s – “The Jews killed Christ”. Past the funeral parlour and pie shop – “They share an oven.” Past the biscuit stall and its moon-faced owners – “Incest”. Past the bank – “Usury.” Past the Citizens Advice Bureau – “Communists”. Past the day nursery – “Unmarried mothers”.
This book is full of great, pained observations on the English working class of the 60s and 70s :
A lot of women had moustaches in those days. I never met anyone who shaved anything, and it didn’t occur to me to shave anything myself until I turned up at Oxford looking like a werewolf.
Less great was the banging on about love, which is JW’s first, second, third and 10th commandment. Love thyself, love others, learn how to love, love is all you need, love loves to love love. It probably comes from listening to too much pop music, but love gets on my wick when it’s promoted into a mystical panacea. But JW is all about the love, the difficulty of it, the elusiveness of it, the overwhelming blah blah blah of it. (She says she reads a lot of "MindBodySpirit stuff" - I wouldn't touch that stuff with YOUR bargepole, never mind mine.)
(not with my bargepole!)
I would have liked less of that kind of blather and more of why she consistently describes herself as “difficult” and also there’s a startling paragraph where she says that as her adoptive mother wanted a boy but got a girl (“The Devil led us to the wrong crib” – she actually said that to Jeannette) and (maybe) dressed her in the already-bought boy baby clothes, then that’s what made her into a lesbian… ! Really? (“I am not much a believer in the gay gene” she says).
Okay – as you see, hampers full of food for thought and many hoots of laughter to be had are right here – a lovely book.
Yes.
Uh oh.
It's a squirmy, maddening, elusive, full-frontal, raging, psychonewagebabbly, moving, heartfelt, essential memoir. I was going to be cute and say that in 1969 The Beatles decided to release an album on which there were no overdubs, no studio tricks at all, but the resulting album Let It Be broke its own rule by containing overdubbed strings & harps & choruses; so many years later Paul McCartney fixed this dishonesty by producing a new version, called Let It Be…Naked, which really is a no-overdub live-in-the-studio Beatles album - the truth at last! And I was going to say that Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is Let It Be and Why Be Happy when you Could be Normal? is Let it Be…Naked. But it’s not true.
(analogy does not hold water, says GR reviewer)
Yes, you find out that in Oranges (and I’m thinking that you need to have seen the tv series or read the book first, both recommended, so no hardship) a lot of punches were pulled; but no, the whole picture is still not revealed, and JW uses the full panoply of 32 track overdubbing, phasing, extreme stereo panning, hotshot studio musicians, the works, in her new version of the old story of her crazy childhood. It’s not a simple tale.
In fact it’s like Hilary Mantel’s frankly weird memoir Giving up the Ghost and even Bob Dylan’s glorious Chronicles – certain parts of the lives in question are given the full treatment, the significant bits, and others are blanked, bits which the reader might object to – hey, what about this thing and that thing and whyja do that and what happened here? Memoirs are for readers who can contain their irritation at being fed only what the author wants them to be fed. We are often left panting with our tongues lolling and whining. Poor memoir readers! That’s the name of the game.
So, Oranges is great but the other two JW novels I read (The Passion and Sexing the Cherry) each earned two meagre stars – fully of gorgeous paragraphs they may be, but I could not make head nor tail of them. This has happened to me before. I love early Joni Mitchell, but then she took a bad turn and produced Hejira and Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter – mama mia! Horrible stuff! (Oh - you love those albums? Sorry!)
(this is where the rot set in)
So I’m not a JW fan, except that she occasionally appears on political discussion shows on the BBC, and I LOVE hearing her, she cuts through the nonsense like laser surgery.
She was a monster, but she was my monster.
JW says this about her adoptive mother who she consistently refers to as “Mrs Winterson”. This mother was physically huge and a religious fruitcake, a key member of an evangelical sect who had strict rules about everything. So on top of the dire poverty of working class England in the 60s and 70s, you had another whole set of deprivations imposed. However, here’s JW on the subject of growing up in a crazy Christian cult :
It is hard to understand the contradictions unless you have lived them : the camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do – then set this against the cruelty of dogma, the miserable rigidity of no drink, no fags, no sex (or if you were married as little sex as possible), no going to the pictures, no reading anything except devotional literature, no fancy clothes (not that we could afford them), no dancing…no pop music, no card games, no pubs. TV was OK but not on Sundays. On Sundays you covered the set with a cloth.
Here’s the young JW walking through town (Accrington) with her mother:
We went past Woolworths – “A Den of Vice”. Past Marks and Spencer’s – “The Jews killed Christ”. Past the funeral parlour and pie shop – “They share an oven.” Past the biscuit stall and its moon-faced owners – “Incest”. Past the bank – “Usury.” Past the Citizens Advice Bureau – “Communists”. Past the day nursery – “Unmarried mothers”.
This book is full of great, pained observations on the English working class of the 60s and 70s :
A lot of women had moustaches in those days. I never met anyone who shaved anything, and it didn’t occur to me to shave anything myself until I turned up at Oxford looking like a werewolf.
Less great was the banging on about love, which is JW’s first, second, third and 10th commandment. Love thyself, love others, learn how to love, love is all you need, love loves to love love. It probably comes from listening to too much pop music, but love gets on my wick when it’s promoted into a mystical panacea. But JW is all about the love, the difficulty of it, the elusiveness of it, the overwhelming blah blah blah of it. (She says she reads a lot of "MindBodySpirit stuff" - I wouldn't touch that stuff with YOUR bargepole, never mind mine.)
(not with my bargepole!)
I would have liked less of that kind of blather and more of why she consistently describes herself as “difficult” and also there’s a startling paragraph where she says that as her adoptive mother wanted a boy but got a girl (“The Devil led us to the wrong crib” – she actually said that to Jeannette) and (maybe) dressed her in the already-bought boy baby clothes, then that’s what made her into a lesbian… ! Really? (“I am not much a believer in the gay gene” she says).
Okay – as you see, hampers full of food for thought and many hoots of laughter to be had are right here – a lovely book.
August 4, 2022
Jeanette Winterson is certainly one of my favourite female writers. Her words speak to me, and they linger, long after the book is closed. She causes me to cry, with a mere sentence, but most of all, I feel that she would understand me.
This book is all about Winterson, and her quest for identity. She was adopted in the early 1960s, and by reading her other book, called Oranges are not the only fruit, one realises that she hasn't had the easiest of childhoods. When one is told that they are adopted, it is definitely never an easy thing to digest. We think it is at the time, but as you age, you want to know more. You eventually want answers, such as, where did my birth mother and father originate from? Did I have any siblings? What time was I born at? Was my birth difficult? I think though, most of all, many adoptees would wish to ask, was I wanted? and, why did you give me away? I have asked those particular questions to thin air SO many times.
Winterson eventually goes through the process of contacting her birth mother and meeting her. Many do that for closure, or some do it just to satisfy their curiosity about where they came from. I am happy that Winterson was able to meet her birth mother, and she was able to get some kind of closure, as that is something that I'll never be able to do, because my birth mother passed away nearly four years ago. I do wonder many things about her, and I have this image of her in my mind. There are things I'll never know about my birth, but quite honestly, above everything else, I hope that she had a happy life, and didn't feel any guilt about giving me up, as she did what she did for a reason, and had she not done so, I wouldn't be writing this today. This particular quote definitely spoke to me;
"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 feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you—and it can’t and it shouldn’t, because something is missing."
One of the things I love about Winterson is her raw passion. You can feel it. Hell, you can almost taste it. She writes with a force so powerful and beautiful that no other can compete with it. This is such a wonderful memoir, and regardless of whether you have been touched by adoption, I'd advise you to read it.
This book is all about Winterson, and her quest for identity. She was adopted in the early 1960s, and by reading her other book, called Oranges are not the only fruit, one realises that she hasn't had the easiest of childhoods. When one is told that they are adopted, it is definitely never an easy thing to digest. We think it is at the time, but as you age, you want to know more. You eventually want answers, such as, where did my birth mother and father originate from? Did I have any siblings? What time was I born at? Was my birth difficult? I think though, most of all, many adoptees would wish to ask, was I wanted? and, why did you give me away? I have asked those particular questions to thin air SO many times.
Winterson eventually goes through the process of contacting her birth mother and meeting her. Many do that for closure, or some do it just to satisfy their curiosity about where they came from. I am happy that Winterson was able to meet her birth mother, and she was able to get some kind of closure, as that is something that I'll never be able to do, because my birth mother passed away nearly four years ago. I do wonder many things about her, and I have this image of her in my mind. There are things I'll never know about my birth, but quite honestly, above everything else, I hope that she had a happy life, and didn't feel any guilt about giving me up, as she did what she did for a reason, and had she not done so, I wouldn't be writing this today. This particular quote definitely spoke to me;
"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 feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you—and it can’t and it shouldn’t, because something is missing."
One of the things I love about Winterson is her raw passion. You can feel it. Hell, you can almost taste it. She writes with a force so powerful and beautiful that no other can compete with it. This is such a wonderful memoir, and regardless of whether you have been touched by adoption, I'd advise you to read it.
November 26, 2012
I finished this book on a frigid Sunday afternoon, lying lazily on my too-deep couch, covered in a ridiculously soft blanket, with my boyfriend cackling in the other room while watching "news fails" on YouTube and my little dog curled up by my side, lending me his warmth.
I have had such an easy life, it is sometimes difficult to fathom.
Jeanette Winterson has not had an easy life. Or anyway she had an almost impossibly surreal / awful childhood (adopted by a frighteningly inconsistent and extremely religious mother, who regularly locked her in the coal shed overnight), an adolescence during which she lived in her car (after mom kicked her out for being a lesbian), and a young adulthood wherein she took her impoverished, working-class self all the way to and through Oxford, despite staggering sexism, homophobia, and snobbery (they told her she was their "working-class experiment," and her best friend was their "black experiment"). She has spent her life overcoming—overcoming abandonment and adoption, overcoming a lack of love, overcoming poverty, overcoming provincialism, overcoming heteronormativity, overcoming the judgments of the entire world.
And yet this memoir, which I expected to be agonizing, is instead matter-of-fact, witty, piercing, and generally triumphant. Jeanette is not a dweller or a wallower, at least not anymore; she is frank about the difficulties she has gone through, relating even rather harrowing anecdotes with grace and compassion. Hers is a journey, always, toward understanding: trying to figure out those around her, saving herself through literature, learning how to love by piecing it together day by day.
The book is in two parts. The first, from birth (more or less) to college, has a narrative tone that is at a slight remove from the story. Jeanette is, of course, a writer, with a writer's sense of pacing, of plot arc, of what to reveal and when to reveal it, of the flourishes necessary to a tale well told. She relates most of the anecdotes from her childhood smoothly—after all, she's spent her whole career polishing and retelling them. This part of the story is moving but a bit pat; it is clever and rather self-aware, although it is certainly devastating and illuminating in turns.
But then—after a two-page "interlude" that encompasses about twenty-five years—the second half of the book is practically in the present, starting maybe five years ago, and it encompasses Jeanette's search for her birth mother. And suddenly the narrative becomes ragged, jagged, raw. This is the story Jeanette is still living, and it has not been rehearsed; it has barely even got done being lived.
She navigates the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the British legal system with a somewhat crazed frenzy, and with the help of kind souls along the way. She opens up her brain and her body and lets us look right in, into her hysterical fears, her calcified anger, the wailing hopefulness she has spent her whole life tamping down into frustration. I can't even describe it; it's devastating, enraging, anxiety-ridden, and so so intense.
And even still, clever! Her writing style throughout is very British and dry, no-nonsense-y and simple but shot through with literary allusions, with whole quoted poems and passages. And funny, I can't stress that enough, because it was the last thing I was expecting. I'm tempted to start quoting lines, but I'd wind up transcribing pages and pages, and I haven't got the time.
But listen: this book is really brilliant. I am now going to sink right back into my too-deep couch, grab the cuddly dog, and start rereading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And after that I'm going to Netflix the BBC movie of it, and then I'm going to comb my shelves and my friends' shelves for all her other books, which I've either never read or haven't read in years.
Jeanette, I love you. You are astonishing.
I have had such an easy life, it is sometimes difficult to fathom.
Jeanette Winterson has not had an easy life. Or anyway she had an almost impossibly surreal / awful childhood (adopted by a frighteningly inconsistent and extremely religious mother, who regularly locked her in the coal shed overnight), an adolescence during which she lived in her car (after mom kicked her out for being a lesbian), and a young adulthood wherein she took her impoverished, working-class self all the way to and through Oxford, despite staggering sexism, homophobia, and snobbery (they told her she was their "working-class experiment," and her best friend was their "black experiment"). She has spent her life overcoming—overcoming abandonment and adoption, overcoming a lack of love, overcoming poverty, overcoming provincialism, overcoming heteronormativity, overcoming the judgments of the entire world.
And yet this memoir, which I expected to be agonizing, is instead matter-of-fact, witty, piercing, and generally triumphant. Jeanette is not a dweller or a wallower, at least not anymore; she is frank about the difficulties she has gone through, relating even rather harrowing anecdotes with grace and compassion. Hers is a journey, always, toward understanding: trying to figure out those around her, saving herself through literature, learning how to love by piecing it together day by day.
The book is in two parts. The first, from birth (more or less) to college, has a narrative tone that is at a slight remove from the story. Jeanette is, of course, a writer, with a writer's sense of pacing, of plot arc, of what to reveal and when to reveal it, of the flourishes necessary to a tale well told. She relates most of the anecdotes from her childhood smoothly—after all, she's spent her whole career polishing and retelling them. This part of the story is moving but a bit pat; it is clever and rather self-aware, although it is certainly devastating and illuminating in turns.
But then—after a two-page "interlude" that encompasses about twenty-five years—the second half of the book is practically in the present, starting maybe five years ago, and it encompasses Jeanette's search for her birth mother. And suddenly the narrative becomes ragged, jagged, raw. This is the story Jeanette is still living, and it has not been rehearsed; it has barely even got done being lived.
She navigates the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the British legal system with a somewhat crazed frenzy, and with the help of kind souls along the way. She opens up her brain and her body and lets us look right in, into her hysterical fears, her calcified anger, the wailing hopefulness she has spent her whole life tamping down into frustration. I can't even describe it; it's devastating, enraging, anxiety-ridden, and so so intense.
And even still, clever! Her writing style throughout is very British and dry, no-nonsense-y and simple but shot through with literary allusions, with whole quoted poems and passages. And funny, I can't stress that enough, because it was the last thing I was expecting. I'm tempted to start quoting lines, but I'd wind up transcribing pages and pages, and I haven't got the time.
But listen: this book is really brilliant. I am now going to sink right back into my too-deep couch, grab the cuddly dog, and start rereading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And after that I'm going to Netflix the BBC movie of it, and then I'm going to comb my shelves and my friends' shelves for all her other books, which I've either never read or haven't read in years.
Jeanette, I love you. You are astonishing.
July 10, 2021
منتشر شد!! (و بینهایت خوشحالم)
داستان آشنایی من با این کتاب برمیگرده به سه سال پیش که خوندمش و یک دل، نه صد دل عاشقش شدم😸، اما احساس میکردم ترجمهش واقعاً جسارت میخواد چون بهنظرم جنت وینترسن نویسندهایه که بسیار سخت مینویسه؛ توی کتابش (کتابهاش) مدام به کتاب مقدس، اسطورهها، سیاست، هنر و بسیاری از مسائل دیگه اشاره میکنه و برای همین ترجمهش صبر و حوصلهٔ فراوانی میخواست و نگران بودم نتیجهٔ کار خوب نشه. پیش خودم میگفتم وقتی ترجمهش میکنم که بتونم لحنش رو که آمیخته به طنزه دربیارم و گنگیای توی متن نباشه (امیدوارم موفق شده باشم!) چون نوشتههاش گاهی بسیار انتزاعی میشه. اینجوری بود که شد ششمین کتابی که ترجمه کردم🙂
الآن اگه از من بپرسید نویسندهٔ محبوبت کیه بدون شک میگم «جنت وینترسن» اون هم نهفقط برای سرگذشتنامهش؛ طی ۱۶ ماهی که مشغول ترجمه و ویرایش این کتاب بودم، برای درک بهتر، اکثر کارهاش رو خوندم و همهشون خاص، هوشمندانه و جذاب بودند. شاید بهتر باشه دربارهٔ کتاب چیز زیادی نگم تا حتی علت اینکه چرا اسم کتاب اینه رو خودتون متوجه شید، فقط میتونم بگم کتابیه در ستایش ادبیات. کتابیه که درعین تلخی بسیار زیادش گاهی از ته دل میخندی و زندگی نویسنده رو راحت فراموش نمیکنی. یکی توی گودریدز نوشته بود: کتابی که گاهی به شیرینی عسله و گاهی به تلخی زهر! مادر نویسنده، «خانم وینترسن»، یکی از عجیبترین شخصیتهای ادبیاته از نظر من.
امیدوارم کتاب رو بخونید و دوست داشته باشید؛ نظراتتون خیلیخیلی ارزشمنده چون کتاب عجیب و خاصیه و دوست دارم «حتما» دیدگاهتون رو دربارهش بدونم.
داستان آشنایی من با این کتاب برمیگرده به سه سال پیش که خوندمش و یک دل، نه صد دل عاشقش شدم😸، اما احساس میکردم ترجمهش واقعاً جسارت میخواد چون بهنظرم جنت وینترسن نویسندهایه که بسیار سخت مینویسه؛ توی کتابش (کتابهاش) مدام به کتاب مقدس، اسطورهها، سیاست، هنر و بسیاری از مسائل دیگه اشاره میکنه و برای همین ترجمهش صبر و حوصلهٔ فراوانی میخواست و نگران بودم نتیجهٔ کار خوب نشه. پیش خودم میگفتم وقتی ترجمهش میکنم که بتونم لحنش رو که آمیخته به طنزه دربیارم و گنگیای توی متن نباشه (امیدوارم موفق شده باشم!) چون نوشتههاش گاهی بسیار انتزاعی میشه. اینجوری بود که شد ششمین کتابی که ترجمه کردم🙂
الآن اگه از من بپرسید نویسندهٔ محبوبت کیه بدون شک میگم «جنت وینترسن» اون هم نهفقط برای سرگذشتنامهش؛ طی ۱۶ ماهی که مشغول ترجمه و ویرایش این کتاب بودم، برای درک بهتر، اکثر کارهاش رو خوندم و همهشون خاص، هوشمندانه و جذاب بودند. شاید بهتر باشه دربارهٔ کتاب چیز زیادی نگم تا حتی علت اینکه چرا اسم کتاب اینه رو خودتون متوجه شید، فقط میتونم بگم کتابیه در ستایش ادبیات. کتابیه که درعین تلخی بسیار زیادش گاهی از ته دل میخندی و زندگی نویسنده رو راحت فراموش نمیکنی. یکی توی گودریدز نوشته بود: کتابی که گاهی به شیرینی عسله و گاهی به تلخی زهر! مادر نویسنده، «خانم وینترسن»، یکی از عجیبترین شخصیتهای ادبیاته از نظر من.
امیدوارم کتاب رو بخونید و دوست داشته باشید؛ نظراتتون خیلیخیلی ارزشمنده چون کتاب عجیب و خاصیه و دوست دارم «حتما» دیدگاهتون رو دربارهش بدونم.
October 24, 2012
this book is a broken elegy to the north of england and a world of small shops, small communities, and simple habits that no longer exists. it's also a tribute to a hardy working class people who knows resilience, pluckiness, no-nonsensicality, and making a life out of what you are given. surprisingly, it's a vindication of the values of faith, which keep people under the direst circumstances out of the clutches of despair and of the feeling of being trapped. these are winterson's words. this truly abused kid never felt despair or a sense of being trapped while she grew up. there was faith for that. no one else felt it either.
have i read too little winterson to know that she writes like this? i remember her prose as lyrical and full of surprises. this is simple, direct, often hysterical in spite of all the horrors (i laughed out loud a lot), and wry. maybe all of her books are written like this and i don't remember. maybe this is written like this because there are only so many ways in which you can describe mayhem.
i have been reading three mother-memoirs in a row (cheryl strayed's Wild and alison bechdel's Are You My Mother? before this) and though all three of them are painful, this is the one that takes the cake for me (all three of them are great, too).
jeanette winterson was given up for adoption six weeks after she was born. in those six weeks she was breastfed and loved. the family who adopted her consisted of a factory worker and a homesteader. mrs. winterson was a true force of nature, not necessarily in a good way. she was definitely a withering and wintering force of nature for poor jeanette, who disappointed her mom (the book shows it could not have been otherwise) by being a girl (turns out the wintersons had settled on a little boy), by being herself a little concentrated force of nature, and by being the devil's spawn. it is not entirely clear what terrible things jeanette did, but she was often punished in unbelievably cruel ways, and she was never loved.
this book is in many ways mrs. winterson's story. she deserves a story and she is lucky her daughter is a fabulous writer. this terrible woman who loved all that is death-like in christianity and lived under the sign of the apocalypse, renunciation of all worldly pleasure, and doom, is described with great compassion. jeanette must have loved her very much. she must have wanted her very much. she must also have been furiously angry at her, but this book is about forgiveness, not anger.
when young willful jeanette falls in love with a girl mrs. winterson basically say it's either the girl or you and jeanette spends the following couple of years sleeping in a borrowed car while going to school full time and having a part-time job. she is sixteen.
then, because she is jeanette winterson and nothing but nothing will ever stop her from getting what she wants, she gets herself into oxford. if you read the first part of the book without knowing who jeanette winterson is, the fact that she got herself into oxford will make your jaw drop. how on earth could this working class girl who had lived in a place stuck several decades behind real time get into one of the most exclusive universities in the world?
well, she did.
in the second part of the book jeanette moves to the very near present and talks about a terrible breakdown she suffered when she was in her late 40s. i won't say what brought it on but it doesn't really matter. in passing she also tells us that she had two more breakdowns and one psychotic crisis. also, she seems to be one of those people who hear voices without having other psychotic symptoms. apparently she heard voices all through her life. in Agnes's Jacket psychology professor gail hornstein debunks the myth that people who hear voices are invariably schizophrenic or bipolar and need to be medicated to kingdom come (i'm sure she's not the first to say so, but her book is the first where i read it). there are indeed people who hear voices but lead an otherwise normal life.
why JW had breakdowns; why she always had a terrible time sustaining loving relationships; why she was troubled all her life is not something that is very difficult to understand. she spent the first 16 years of her life not getting any love. this tends not to do wonders for one's psychological health.
this book is also an ode to books and words. books and words saved young jeanette, plain and simple. books and words have saved many unloved kids and will continue to do so as long as humankind exists, because there will always be unloved kids and works of literature. her love for and gratitude to literature could not be bigger. it's time for me to read all of her books.
have i read too little winterson to know that she writes like this? i remember her prose as lyrical and full of surprises. this is simple, direct, often hysterical in spite of all the horrors (i laughed out loud a lot), and wry. maybe all of her books are written like this and i don't remember. maybe this is written like this because there are only so many ways in which you can describe mayhem.
i have been reading three mother-memoirs in a row (cheryl strayed's Wild and alison bechdel's Are You My Mother? before this) and though all three of them are painful, this is the one that takes the cake for me (all three of them are great, too).
jeanette winterson was given up for adoption six weeks after she was born. in those six weeks she was breastfed and loved. the family who adopted her consisted of a factory worker and a homesteader. mrs. winterson was a true force of nature, not necessarily in a good way. she was definitely a withering and wintering force of nature for poor jeanette, who disappointed her mom (the book shows it could not have been otherwise) by being a girl (turns out the wintersons had settled on a little boy), by being herself a little concentrated force of nature, and by being the devil's spawn. it is not entirely clear what terrible things jeanette did, but she was often punished in unbelievably cruel ways, and she was never loved.
this book is in many ways mrs. winterson's story. she deserves a story and she is lucky her daughter is a fabulous writer. this terrible woman who loved all that is death-like in christianity and lived under the sign of the apocalypse, renunciation of all worldly pleasure, and doom, is described with great compassion. jeanette must have loved her very much. she must have wanted her very much. she must also have been furiously angry at her, but this book is about forgiveness, not anger.
when young willful jeanette falls in love with a girl mrs. winterson basically say it's either the girl or you and jeanette spends the following couple of years sleeping in a borrowed car while going to school full time and having a part-time job. she is sixteen.
then, because she is jeanette winterson and nothing but nothing will ever stop her from getting what she wants, she gets herself into oxford. if you read the first part of the book without knowing who jeanette winterson is, the fact that she got herself into oxford will make your jaw drop. how on earth could this working class girl who had lived in a place stuck several decades behind real time get into one of the most exclusive universities in the world?
well, she did.
in the second part of the book jeanette moves to the very near present and talks about a terrible breakdown she suffered when she was in her late 40s. i won't say what brought it on but it doesn't really matter. in passing she also tells us that she had two more breakdowns and one psychotic crisis. also, she seems to be one of those people who hear voices without having other psychotic symptoms. apparently she heard voices all through her life. in Agnes's Jacket psychology professor gail hornstein debunks the myth that people who hear voices are invariably schizophrenic or bipolar and need to be medicated to kingdom come (i'm sure she's not the first to say so, but her book is the first where i read it). there are indeed people who hear voices but lead an otherwise normal life.
why JW had breakdowns; why she always had a terrible time sustaining loving relationships; why she was troubled all her life is not something that is very difficult to understand. she spent the first 16 years of her life not getting any love. this tends not to do wonders for one's psychological health.
this book is also an ode to books and words. books and words saved young jeanette, plain and simple. books and words have saved many unloved kids and will continue to do so as long as humankind exists, because there will always be unloved kids and works of literature. her love for and gratitude to literature could not be bigger. it's time for me to read all of her books.
July 10, 2019
I'm very glad I read this - I wasn't going to - I put it down at page 8, thinking it was going to be a glorifying, self-referencing re-write of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. I was wrong.
Sometimes I think, books come into your hands - not by accident. I was in a reading rut; I could not settle to anything after Villette - but here I am rescued by a Northener, and my mind slips easily to Hilary Mantel, Wendy Cope - there is something about being Northern. It is very much part of our identity.
After the hiccup of page 8 - the first third turns out to be very funny indeed, and gives an excellent history and background to Manchester - it was the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution - yes it's all there in the back of my mind, the cotton mills, the Pennines, lowering and beautiful, James Hargreaves who invented the spinning jenny in 1764.
The spinning jenny was able to do the work of eight spinning wheels, and is really the start of the Lancashire looms and Lancashire's grip on the world cotton trade.
But booming loud and clear over the character of Manchester is the huge battleaxe of Mrs Winterson - her of the religion, fags, and new-fangled organ.
I don't know, and never will, whether she couldn't have children or whether she just wouldn't put herself through the necessaries.
That really is the basis of the book. Jeanette Winterson was adopted by John and Constance Winterson in 1960, Accrington, Manchester. And this book tells the story of how she struggled in this family and finally in 2007 after a nervous breakdown, realizes she must come to terms with the adoption and find, if she can, her birth mother.
But you have to understand the whole horror of Mrs Winterson, and Jeanette does it again, as she did so successfully with Oranges, published 1985. The first part is great, and then follows a rather bitter, hurt section. The story dampens and wanders a bit towards the middle, with a strategic Intermission which is simply a place where the author draws strength, and sets her shoulders for the dynamic and very powerful last third. In the final section, the hard work of her research, her battle with courts and authorities finally bears Fruit and there is a wholesome and very moving reconciliation - but true to the nature of our writer, Ms Winterson - her angry feelings break forth again, but I completely understood this.
Let me give you some more of Jeanette - I love that she allows her northern idiom through in the writing:
And I grew up like in all those Dickens novels, where the real families are the pretend ones; the people who become your family through deep bonds of affection and the continuity of time.
She is pleased when she does finally meet her birth mother, but is very careful to record accurately and honestly that this causes a lot of mixed feelings.
There is a big gap between our lives. She is upset about Winterson-world. She blames herself and she blames Mrs Winterson. Yet I would rather be this me - the me I have become - than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way including Mrs W. I think I am lucky.
And then a page later she says:
I notice that I hate Ann [her birth mother] criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.
Ann came to London. That was a mistake. It is our third meeting and we have a serious row. I am shouting at her, 'At least Mrs Winterson was there. Where were you?'
I don't blame her and I am glad she made the choice she made. Clearly I am furious about it too.
This I absolutely love - her total honesty with us. This is very brave, but the book is brave - all of it. The middle section I found hard to understand - it is when Jeanette finds the box with the old birth certificates - and basically goes into a downward spiral of - madness. Yes, she admits that - she was completely unhinged mentally. But I couldn't follow, I just couldn't see why be so upset. That is the closed gate. The adult writer has the words to explain, but it is the child who feels so deeply. I often think that is why fiction provides this other medium - where the reader can follow. But it takes a very determined and strong writer to go back; to become the five year old, or the ten year old, who aches with not knowing who their real family is, especially when the replacement one is So Awful.
Ms Winterson did it once in Oranges - the fictionalised version of her childhood - it's really not possible to go there again. But this book - Why Be Happy offers an equally valid account.
Can we go back to the beginning - to the horrors of Mrs Winterson. I think you really have to experience Mrs W - because whether you have read Oranges or not you will want to dive back in when you hear what the poor child Jeanette had to deal with - I don't usually refer to authors by their first names - but she is both the real person and the fictional character - a bit strange, but that's the story.
I will give you two notable passages about Mrs W. and leave you to make up your own minds. Here they are:
I know they both drank a bit before they found Jesus. And I don't think my mother was depressed in those days. After the tent crusade, where they both became Pentecostal evengelical Christians, they both gave up drink - except for cherry brandy at New Year - and my father traded in his Woodbines for Polo mints. My mother carried on smoking because she said it kept her weight down. Her smoking had to be a secret though, and she kept an air-fresher she claimed was fly spray in her handbag.
No one seemed to think it was unusual to keep fly spray in your handbag.
She was convinced God would find her a child, and I suppose that if God is providing the baby, having sex can be crossed off the list. I don't know how Dad felt about this. Mrs Winterson always said, 'He's not like other men . . .'
Every Friday he gave her his pay packet and she gave him back enough change for three packets of Polo mints.
She said, 'They're his only pleasure . . . '
Poor Dad.
When he got married again at seventy two, his new wife Lillian, who was ten years younger and a good time girl, told me it was like sleeping with a red-hot poker.
And yes "good time girl" is a euphemism.
The next section is around the half-way mark in the book and most of the humour has been replaced with a very bitter internalization of how Mrs Winterson, has caused a great deal of damage to her, to Jeanette, to the child, to her internal sense of who she is. There is her grief for the recognition of lack from the loss of love.
This particular little sketch - allowed me to feel something of the depth of that loss.
Janey and I were happy. We went to college. We saw each other every day. I had started driving lessons in a beat-up Mini on a piece of spare land. I was living in my own world of books and love. The world was vivid and untouched. I felt free again - I think because I was loved. I took Mrs Winterson some flowers.
When I got back that night, the flowers were in a vase on the table. I looked at them . . . The stalks of the flowers were in the vase. She had cut off the heads and thrown them on the unlit fire. The fire was ready-laid, and on the neat black layer of coal were the white heads of the little carnations.
I wanted to weep. So, there you have it - or rather her - Mrs Winterson. It certainly helped me to appreciate my own mother, with whom I don't have the best of relations, but compared to Jeanette, I am lucky, very very lucky.
Sometimes I think, books come into your hands - not by accident. I was in a reading rut; I could not settle to anything after Villette - but here I am rescued by a Northener, and my mind slips easily to Hilary Mantel, Wendy Cope - there is something about being Northern. It is very much part of our identity.
After the hiccup of page 8 - the first third turns out to be very funny indeed, and gives an excellent history and background to Manchester - it was the powerhouse of the Industrial Revolution - yes it's all there in the back of my mind, the cotton mills, the Pennines, lowering and beautiful, James Hargreaves who invented the spinning jenny in 1764.
The spinning jenny was able to do the work of eight spinning wheels, and is really the start of the Lancashire looms and Lancashire's grip on the world cotton trade.
But booming loud and clear over the character of Manchester is the huge battleaxe of Mrs Winterson - her of the religion, fags, and new-fangled organ.
I don't know, and never will, whether she couldn't have children or whether she just wouldn't put herself through the necessaries.
That really is the basis of the book. Jeanette Winterson was adopted by John and Constance Winterson in 1960, Accrington, Manchester. And this book tells the story of how she struggled in this family and finally in 2007 after a nervous breakdown, realizes she must come to terms with the adoption and find, if she can, her birth mother.
But you have to understand the whole horror of Mrs Winterson, and Jeanette does it again, as she did so successfully with Oranges, published 1985. The first part is great, and then follows a rather bitter, hurt section. The story dampens and wanders a bit towards the middle, with a strategic Intermission which is simply a place where the author draws strength, and sets her shoulders for the dynamic and very powerful last third. In the final section, the hard work of her research, her battle with courts and authorities finally bears Fruit and there is a wholesome and very moving reconciliation - but true to the nature of our writer, Ms Winterson - her angry feelings break forth again, but I completely understood this.
Let me give you some more of Jeanette - I love that she allows her northern idiom through in the writing:
And I grew up like in all those Dickens novels, where the real families are the pretend ones; the people who become your family through deep bonds of affection and the continuity of time.
She is pleased when she does finally meet her birth mother, but is very careful to record accurately and honestly that this causes a lot of mixed feelings.
There is a big gap between our lives. She is upset about Winterson-world. She blames herself and she blames Mrs Winterson. Yet I would rather be this me - the me I have become - than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way including Mrs W. I think I am lucky.
And then a page later she says:
I notice that I hate Ann [her birth mother] criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.
Ann came to London. That was a mistake. It is our third meeting and we have a serious row. I am shouting at her, 'At least Mrs Winterson was there. Where were you?'
I don't blame her and I am glad she made the choice she made. Clearly I am furious about it too.
This I absolutely love - her total honesty with us. This is very brave, but the book is brave - all of it. The middle section I found hard to understand - it is when Jeanette finds the box with the old birth certificates - and basically goes into a downward spiral of - madness. Yes, she admits that - she was completely unhinged mentally. But I couldn't follow, I just couldn't see why be so upset. That is the closed gate. The adult writer has the words to explain, but it is the child who feels so deeply. I often think that is why fiction provides this other medium - where the reader can follow. But it takes a very determined and strong writer to go back; to become the five year old, or the ten year old, who aches with not knowing who their real family is, especially when the replacement one is So Awful.
Ms Winterson did it once in Oranges - the fictionalised version of her childhood - it's really not possible to go there again. But this book - Why Be Happy offers an equally valid account.
Can we go back to the beginning - to the horrors of Mrs Winterson. I think you really have to experience Mrs W - because whether you have read Oranges or not you will want to dive back in when you hear what the poor child Jeanette had to deal with - I don't usually refer to authors by their first names - but she is both the real person and the fictional character - a bit strange, but that's the story.
I will give you two notable passages about Mrs W. and leave you to make up your own minds. Here they are:
I know they both drank a bit before they found Jesus. And I don't think my mother was depressed in those days. After the tent crusade, where they both became Pentecostal evengelical Christians, they both gave up drink - except for cherry brandy at New Year - and my father traded in his Woodbines for Polo mints. My mother carried on smoking because she said it kept her weight down. Her smoking had to be a secret though, and she kept an air-fresher she claimed was fly spray in her handbag.
No one seemed to think it was unusual to keep fly spray in your handbag.
She was convinced God would find her a child, and I suppose that if God is providing the baby, having sex can be crossed off the list. I don't know how Dad felt about this. Mrs Winterson always said, 'He's not like other men . . .'
Every Friday he gave her his pay packet and she gave him back enough change for three packets of Polo mints.
She said, 'They're his only pleasure . . . '
Poor Dad.
When he got married again at seventy two, his new wife Lillian, who was ten years younger and a good time girl, told me it was like sleeping with a red-hot poker.
And yes "good time girl" is a euphemism.
The next section is around the half-way mark in the book and most of the humour has been replaced with a very bitter internalization of how Mrs Winterson, has caused a great deal of damage to her, to Jeanette, to the child, to her internal sense of who she is. There is her grief for the recognition of lack from the loss of love.
This particular little sketch - allowed me to feel something of the depth of that loss.
Janey and I were happy. We went to college. We saw each other every day. I had started driving lessons in a beat-up Mini on a piece of spare land. I was living in my own world of books and love. The world was vivid and untouched. I felt free again - I think because I was loved. I took Mrs Winterson some flowers.
When I got back that night, the flowers were in a vase on the table. I looked at them . . . The stalks of the flowers were in the vase. She had cut off the heads and thrown them on the unlit fire. The fire was ready-laid, and on the neat black layer of coal were the white heads of the little carnations.
I wanted to weep. So, there you have it - or rather her - Mrs Winterson. It certainly helped me to appreciate my own mother, with whom I don't have the best of relations, but compared to Jeanette, I am lucky, very very lucky.
Read
February 2, 2020There are authors who continually write and rewrite the same story, continually sand down the same hard facts, continually polish and repolish until they arrive at the final version which has the perfectly smooth shape of an egg, newly laid. And at whatever angle you choose to view that egg, it remains perfect, impossible to add to or take away from. I'm thinking here of John McGahern in particular, who worked on the hard facts of a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood in many and varied pieces of fiction until he produced his final novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun by which time he had worked through all his anger, all his loss, all his disappointment and could finally offer us, while still using many elements from his earlier works, a simple meditation on nature and the cycle of life and death.
I feel that Jeanette Winterson, who also experienced a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood, will someday arrive at a point where she will be able to offer us her own piece of perfection. This present book reads to me like a stage on the way towards that point, full of the promise of even better things to come. It is also a further exploration of some of the themes of her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, and is full of insights from her continually active writer's mind, insights on reading, on writing, on religion, on nature, on time, on life and on death.
McGahern and Winterson have many things in common but perhaps the most important thing they share is an early exposure to books, Winterson, in the public library in Accrington, McGahern by means of a kind neighbour's personal library, both reading their way steadfastly through the canon of English literature. Both saved by books.
I heard Winterson give a very inspirational talk on writing in Shakespeare & Co in Paris a couple of years ago but had no idea at the time what she'd been going through in her personal life during that very period. She's a fighter and I salute her.
I feel that Jeanette Winterson, who also experienced a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood, will someday arrive at a point where she will be able to offer us her own piece of perfection. This present book reads to me like a stage on the way towards that point, full of the promise of even better things to come. It is also a further exploration of some of the themes of her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, and is full of insights from her continually active writer's mind, insights on reading, on writing, on religion, on nature, on time, on life and on death.
McGahern and Winterson have many things in common but perhaps the most important thing they share is an early exposure to books, Winterson, in the public library in Accrington, McGahern by means of a kind neighbour's personal library, both reading their way steadfastly through the canon of English literature. Both saved by books.
I heard Winterson give a very inspirational talk on writing in Shakespeare & Co in Paris a couple of years ago but had no idea at the time what she'd been going through in her personal life during that very period. She's a fighter and I salute her.
February 4, 2017
I usually don't read lots of memoirs and biographies, in general I prefer fiction or non-fiction, but I must say thought that this is one of the most genuine and emotional memoirs I've ever read.
Jeannette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, and grew up in Accrington, Lacarshire after being adopted by Constance and John William Winterson in the early 1960's.
This book recounts her quest for her identity, origin, her (birth) mother and ultimately for love and acceptance.
It's a different kind of memoir in that is doesn't follows a chronological structure. She jumps back and forth between different periods in her life, and that's probably why the book feels so authentic, you have a sense that you are sitting down with a good friend while she is telling you her story.
The author comes across as a clever, witty, and as a person in search of answers. At times she writes with great urgency, almost desperation. It's feels as if she's running out of time and want to explain things to you, she wants to make sure you understand her history. Which l suppose is one of the reasons why people write these type memoirs, I think that this process provides for many emotional closure.
Winterson has a great sense of humor and is a wonderful conversationalist. Throughout the book she takes time to explain some of the cultural, religious and political ethos of these times in the UK.
There are also quite a few extremely funny anecdotes. I love that in the middle of such a difficult upbringing, the author has the capacity to laugh at some rather peculiar and crazy circumstances.
The center theme of the memoir is her descriptions of her very peculiar Pentecostal upbringing as well as her tumultuous relationship with her adoptive mother, whom she calls through most of the book "Mrs. Winterson".
Mrs. Winterson is described as an "out of scale, larger than life" woman who at times sounds pretty much deranged. A woman opposed to any sort of intimacy, sexual or otherwise, she casts a huge shadow on the Winterson's household, and little Jeannette doesn't feel loved by either parent. Her father is a withdrawn, simple man who has been belittled by his wife and is incapable of standing up for himself, let alone for his adoptive daughter.
Little Jeannette is abused, both emotionally (her mother constantly alludes that in her adoption process “the Devil led us to the wrong crib”) and physically, she is beaten, forced to sleep outside of the house, and pretty much left to her own devices at a very early age.
In Mrs. Winterson's ultra fundamentalist version of Christianity, there's not room for reading secular books, so she forbids Jeannette from reading anything other than the Bible. Jeannette doesn't obeys, of course, and when Mrs. W discovers dozens of books hidden under Jeannette's mattress, she burns them all. This was to me a painful passage to read(as I am sure it would be for most readers)
Later on, Mrs. Winterson discovers that Jeannette is attracted to women and has in fact started a relationship with a girl that also attends her church, this sets in motion a series of events, culminating with the spectacle of a 3-day exorcism performed by the pastor who tries to, to put it on contemporary terms "pray the gay away".
When Jeannette is 16 years old, she is evicted from her home after Mrs. W discovers a 2nd girlfriend, initially she lives in her car, but shortly after she gets under a roof, when a sympathetic teacher takes pity on her and allows her to stay in her house.
Jeannette stars reading English Literature in Prose A-Z, as she calls it. There's a very good public library in her town, and she's determined to read all the available authors in alphabetical order. "A book is a door,” she discovers “You open it. You step through.”
Eventually she applies “to read English at Oxford because, "it was the most impossible thing” she could think of; she graduates, she writes books and becomes a well known and successful author.
The memoir then makes a big jump, and for whatever reason the author decides to take her story 25 years later, when she has just broken up with her girlfriend of 6 years. This is when her writing becomes more introspective, a search to connect the past with the present.
By now, Mrs. W has passed away and Jeannette has managed to maintain an almost normal relationship with her father.
The author then begins the search for her birth mother, which is perhaps where the reader can feel a deeper sense of empathy and connection with her. She is desperate to find that final link to her past, yet she's also petrified by fear of what she might find. Who can't relate to that feeling?
After jumping many hoops throughout the inept and insensible bureaucracy that apparently rules the adoption system in the UK (I suspect, the same is true in the US and other Western countries), she manages to find Ann, her birth mother, makes peace with her and her decision to give Jeannette away.
Of course, this being real life, there's not exactly a happy ending, not in the strict sense of the word anyway, so after her first meeting with Ann, she quickly comes to the realization that the instant connection she might had been anticipating does not come.
Finally, I think that what saves Jeannette Winston is that she possesses both a very clever and inquisitive mind as well as an indomitable and defiant personality.
By the end of the book, she appears to have accomplish an exorcism of her own: what starts as a detailed and painful description of the horrible mother, ends with a sense of closure and forgiveness.
When referring to a discussion she had with Ann, she says "I notice that I hate Ann criticizing Mrs. Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster". We humans are full of contradictions, aren't we?
Jeannette Winterson is the audiobook narrator of her memoir, I am for the most part, not a fan of authors narrating their own books and I do preferred that they leave this to the professionals, with that said, Winterson really did a wonderful job. Perhaps because of the 1st person narrative and also because her writing style is so intense, I don't imagine anybody else being able to narrate this book as well as she did.
This is an unforgettable and extraordinary memoir.
October 18, 2018
I do not know why I haven’t picked up a Jeanette Winterson book earlier. I loved this a whole lot and cannot wait to read more of her books. Jeanette Winterson tells the story of relationship with her mothers; both her biological mother and her adopted mother. I listened to her tell this story on audiobook and I cannot recommend this highly enough. Winterson infuses the story with her wry tone and wit and it was just a wonderful listening experience.
The family she is adopted in are conservative to no end and especially her mother (who she almost exclusively calls Mrs Winterson throughout the book) is often horrible to her. Listening to Jeanette Winterson detail the abuse she suffered would have been unbearable if she didn’t manage to always infuse her story with a sense of optimism. This sense of reflection was what struck me the strongest about this book. While Jeanette Winterson does not have everything figured out by a long shot, she is eloquent and wise and often deeply funny and this made this memoir a joy to read.
I will now definitely have to read Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a semi-fictional account of Winterson’s life to see how she transformed her suffering into wonder.
You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog.
The family she is adopted in are conservative to no end and especially her mother (who she almost exclusively calls Mrs Winterson throughout the book) is often horrible to her. Listening to Jeanette Winterson detail the abuse she suffered would have been unbearable if she didn’t manage to always infuse her story with a sense of optimism. This sense of reflection was what struck me the strongest about this book. While Jeanette Winterson does not have everything figured out by a long shot, she is eloquent and wise and often deeply funny and this made this memoir a joy to read.
I will now definitely have to read Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a semi-fictional account of Winterson’s life to see how she transformed her suffering into wonder.
You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog.
October 30, 2019
I have read three of Winterson's books; The Gap of Time, a retelling of Shakespeare's Winters Tale, The Passion, and Christmas Stories. In each case, the prose outweighed anything I might have felt about the story itself, because there is some indefinable quality there that defies description. In this, a memoir of her childhood as an adopted child of a Pentecostal woman who was mentally ill, and her search for her birth mother in middle age after she had become a celebrated author, the same thing applies. She is brutally honest, even when describing her own mental breakdown and road to recovery, to become a person who felt worthy of love.
In Jeanette's case, she claims that books saved her all her life, gave her someplace to go when she couldn't go home, and showed her another world.
"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 nights on the doorstep".
She also feels most at home and at peace in a bookshop or library. So, although I was not adopted and always knew I was loved and had a happy childhood, I very much identified with both young Jeanette, who started in the A's of the library section "English Literature A - Z", and middle-aged Jeanette, who knew that books can be counted on when people can not. I suspect a lot of GR readers feel the same.
This is one of the better memoirs I've read in a while, and I still have a lot of Winterson's books to read yet, including her first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", which is a fictionalized version of her childhood. She's a remarkable author.
In Jeanette's case, she claims that books saved her all her life, gave her someplace to go when she couldn't go home, and showed her another world.
"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 nights on the doorstep".
She also feels most at home and at peace in a bookshop or library. So, although I was not adopted and always knew I was loved and had a happy childhood, I very much identified with both young Jeanette, who started in the A's of the library section "English Literature A - Z", and middle-aged Jeanette, who knew that books can be counted on when people can not. I suspect a lot of GR readers feel the same.
This is one of the better memoirs I've read in a while, and I still have a lot of Winterson's books to read yet, including her first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", which is a fictionalized version of her childhood. She's a remarkable author.
April 25, 2019
“Non è mai troppo tardi per imparare ad amare. Ma è uno sforzo che spaventa”
Chi di noi non ha mai iniziato un libro grazie solamente ad un titolo intrigante? Beh, in questo caso il titolo mi ha proprio accalappiato. Non sempre bel titolo significa bel libro (anzi...), ma in questo caso devo dire che è stato così, almeno per me.
Jeanette (che poi altri non è che la scrittrice), abbandonata dalla madre e poi adottata da una famiglia che non le ha reso le cose semplici, ha vissuto con la sensazione continua di non essere accettata, amata e desiderata. Tanta sofferenza quindi, che si è lentamente trasformata in una corazza di protezione che le ha impedito di credere a fondo
“Quando l’amore è inaffidabile, e tu sei una bambina, finisci per credere che sia questa la vera natura dell’amore. Solo da adulti vediamo gli errori dei nostri genitori. All’inizio, l’amore che ricevi è l’amore che rimane in te.”
Una storia tutta al femminile (la protagonista, la madre adottiva, la madre genetica, le compagne della protagonista, omosessuale), ricca di non detto, di intransigenza, di incomunicabilità, di durezza.
Mi ha fatto riflettere su quanto possano essere esigenti i rapporti tra donne. I rapporti uomo donna (lo dico da uomo) possono essere molto difficili. Ma chissà, forse quelli tra donne lo sono ancora di più? Forse le donne, così portate alla comunicazione in genere, non sono poi così avvezze a esprimere i propri sentimenti e il proprio sentire?
Un libro autobiografico appassionante, prezioso per le profonde considerazioni (specie in tutta la prima parte) e per l’ironia che pervade il racconto, nonostante il dolore.
“Un libro è una porta. La apri. Entri. Potrai tornare indietro?”
June 7, 2017
Read this if you want your heart broken. Read this if you need it healed.
September 26, 2015
There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling
I might have expected the audacity of this book, but the humility startled me. I expected the old trauma, but the fresh wounds caught me off guard. I was reminded of What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness which I didn't think much of at all; the trauma memoir is not a genre I get along with. I love the fictionalised version of Jeanette's growing up, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit so much; it's one of my favourite books, and here she shares that reading herself as fiction as well as fact was necessary and liberating. I think it was necessary for me to enjoy the story, too. I felt for Jeanette here, and I appreciated her insights and on-point mini-polemics, especially into politics and northern working class life, but I definitely got more out of Oranges.
When Jeanette went mad, she met the character Martha Hesse meets in her experiments with madness in The Four-Gated City That jolted me. Lessing knew what she was talking about. I was also furious about the callous bureaucracy Jeanette faced when trying to find her birth mother. What the hell??!? The naked honesty with which she admits her struggles to love and be loved is so humbling, almost intimidating. The social worker, thankfully, knew exactly what to say, though nothing could ever be enough. Most strangely I felt myself working towards some new spaces of creative self acceptance as I read. And most importantly, I was reminded to let myself feel, to love life and be open even when it hurts to be open.
What else can I say? There are lots of quotables, particularly about books (as homes and hearths), but this is my favourite. I'm stashing it for later use, and I imagine I'll be pulling it out pretty regularly:
When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
I might have expected the audacity of this book, but the humility startled me. I expected the old trauma, but the fresh wounds caught me off guard. I was reminded of What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness which I didn't think much of at all; the trauma memoir is not a genre I get along with. I love the fictionalised version of Jeanette's growing up, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit so much; it's one of my favourite books, and here she shares that reading herself as fiction as well as fact was necessary and liberating. I think it was necessary for me to enjoy the story, too. I felt for Jeanette here, and I appreciated her insights and on-point mini-polemics, especially into politics and northern working class life, but I definitely got more out of Oranges.
When Jeanette went mad, she met the character Martha Hesse meets in her experiments with madness in The Four-Gated City That jolted me. Lessing knew what she was talking about. I was also furious about the callous bureaucracy Jeanette faced when trying to find her birth mother. What the hell??!? The naked honesty with which she admits her struggles to love and be loved is so humbling, almost intimidating. The social worker, thankfully, knew exactly what to say, though nothing could ever be enough. Most strangely I felt myself working towards some new spaces of creative self acceptance as I read. And most importantly, I was reminded to let myself feel, to love life and be open even when it hurts to be open.
What else can I say? There are lots of quotables, particularly about books (as homes and hearths), but this is my favourite. I'm stashing it for later use, and I imagine I'll be pulling it out pretty regularly:
When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead.
July 1, 2021
فهمیدم تولد دوباره فقط به معنای زندهبودن نیست، بلکه به معنای انتخاب زندگیست. اینکه زیستن را انتخاب کنی و با وجود تمام هرجومرجهای فراوان و رنجهای زندگی، آگاهانه مشتاق زیستن باشی...
باید بگویم که وقتی کمی درباره کتاب شنیدم، به شدت مشتاق خوندنش شدم. فکر میکردم رمانیست که درباره عشق و علاقه یک دختر به کتابها و ادبیات. و وقتی هم که شروع به خواندنش کردم مشتاق این بودم که ببینم درباره کتابها حرف زده بشود. اما اینطور نبود.
از ابتدای کتاب، فهمیدم که اصلا رمان نیست! کتاب تقریبا یک سرگذشتنامه است. سرگذشت دختری با خانواده و شرایط زندگی عجیب.
کمی که از خواندنش گذشت، کمکم ناراحتیم ازین که کتاب دقیقا آنچیزی نیست که انتظارش را داشتم، از بین رفت. بینهایت جذب داستانهای جِنِت درباره زندگیش شدم. موضوعاتی که مطرح کرده بود را خیلی پسندیدم. مثلا خواندن از رابطه دختر-مادر و یا حرف زدن درباره کالتها برایم موضوع جدیدی بود. علاقه جنت به کتابها، نگاهش به مسئله جنسیت و شجاعتش را از ته دل ستودم. خیلی از داستانها برایم غیرقابل تصور و باورنکردنی بود... دشواریها و سختیهای ز��دگی جِنِت حسابی متاثرم کرد.
از ته دل درکش میکردم. درک میکردم که گاهی در زندگی کم میآوری و باید با تمام وجود تلاش کنی تا ادامه دهی.
ترجمه کتاب واقعا خیلی خوب بود. در حال خواندنش اصلا باورم نمیشد کتاب توانسته مجوز بگیرد و چاپ شود! نسخه انگلیسیش هم کنار دستم بود و تقریبا به جز یک پاراگراف و چند جمله، چیزی از کتاب حذف نشده. به نظرم مترجم، کارش را واقعا عالی و به نحو احسن انجام داده و توانسته کتاب را از سانسورهای عظیمتر حفظ کند!
با اینحال، چندجا اشکالات ویرایشی و چاپی دیدم که توی ذوقم زد. کاش روزی برسد که ناشرها به مخاطب احترام بیشتری بگذارند و کتابها را بیاشکالتر به بازار بفرستند.
در آخر، باید اعتراف کنم که در نهایت علاقهم به کتاب و نویسندهش، از آنهایی نیست که به همه توصیهش کنم. به نظرم باید کمانتظارتر سراغش رفت و از خواندنش لذت برد :)
باید بگویم که وقتی کمی درباره کتاب شنیدم، به شدت مشتاق خوندنش شدم. فکر میکردم رمانیست که درباره عشق و علاقه یک دختر به کتابها و ادبیات. و وقتی هم که شروع به خواندنش کردم مشتاق این بودم که ببینم درباره کتابها حرف زده بشود. اما اینطور نبود.
از ابتدای کتاب، فهمیدم که اصلا رمان نیست! کتاب تقریبا یک سرگذشتنامه است. سرگذشت دختری با خانواده و شرایط زندگی عجیب.
کمی که از خواندنش گذشت، کمکم ناراحتیم ازین که کتاب دقیقا آنچیزی نیست که انتظارش را داشتم، از بین رفت. بینهایت جذب داستانهای جِنِت درباره زندگیش شدم. موضوعاتی که مطرح کرده بود را خیلی پسندیدم. مثلا خواندن از رابطه دختر-مادر و یا حرف زدن درباره کالتها برایم موضوع جدیدی بود. علاقه جنت به کتابها، نگاهش به مسئله جنسیت و شجاعتش را از ته دل ستودم. خیلی از داستانها برایم غیرقابل تصور و باورنکردنی بود... دشواریها و سختیهای ز��دگی جِنِت حسابی متاثرم کرد.
از ته دل درکش میکردم. درک میکردم که گاهی در زندگی کم میآوری و باید با تمام وجود تلاش کنی تا ادامه دهی.
ترجمه کتاب واقعا خیلی خوب بود. در حال خواندنش اصلا باورم نمیشد کتاب توانسته مجوز بگیرد و چاپ شود! نسخه انگلیسیش هم کنار دستم بود و تقریبا به جز یک پاراگراف و چند جمله، چیزی از کتاب حذف نشده. به نظرم مترجم، کارش را واقعا عالی و به نحو احسن انجام داده و توانسته کتاب را از سانسورهای عظیمتر حفظ کند!
با اینحال، چندجا اشکالات ویرایشی و چاپی دیدم که توی ذوقم زد. کاش روزی برسد که ناشرها به مخاطب احترام بیشتری بگذارند و کتابها را بیاشکالتر به بازار بفرستند.
در آخر، باید اعتراف کنم که در نهایت علاقهم به کتاب و نویسندهش، از آنهایی نیست که به همه توصیهش کنم. به نظرم باید کمانتظارتر سراغش رفت و از خواندنش لذت برد :)
June 10, 2012
It pains me to give Jeanette Winterson's memoir a poor review. It pained me so much more to read this book. This, from a writer who is absolutely without peer in storytelling, language and the details of excruciating heartbreak.
To be fair, I did really enjoy the first 2/3 of the book. She writes in a frank and conversational style describing her early life and referencing her early books. I recognized her voice immediately and I settled in, catching up with an old friend.
Unfortunately as her story continues it becomes more of a search for the grail (a concept she mentions several times), a mapping of the early hurts she experienced (an infant put up for adoption) as evidenced in her present day relationship failures and what she describes as an inability to love. She "goes mad", begins a search for her birthmother and the narrative becomes rather self indulgent and whiny in the process. Her knight in shining armor (new girlfriend and psychoanalyst) appears and by then I was feeling quite betrayed by the mediocrity of it all.
Yes there is a genre for books that go there (self help, recovery, personal growth) and there is a language for this too ("I'm no longer a victim, I'm a survivor") but I didn't want Jeanette Winterson to write it.
To be fair, I did really enjoy the first 2/3 of the book. She writes in a frank and conversational style describing her early life and referencing her early books. I recognized her voice immediately and I settled in, catching up with an old friend.
Unfortunately as her story continues it becomes more of a search for the grail (a concept she mentions several times), a mapping of the early hurts she experienced (an infant put up for adoption) as evidenced in her present day relationship failures and what she describes as an inability to love. She "goes mad", begins a search for her birthmother and the narrative becomes rather self indulgent and whiny in the process. Her knight in shining armor (new girlfriend and psychoanalyst) appears and by then I was feeling quite betrayed by the mediocrity of it all.
Yes there is a genre for books that go there (self help, recovery, personal growth) and there is a language for this too ("I'm no longer a victim, I'm a survivor") but I didn't want Jeanette Winterson to write it.
November 19, 2011
What a fierce child young Jeanette must have been. A small warrior, blazing with desire for life, battling the sheer bloody awfulness of her upbringing and the narrowness of her surroundings, protecting herself from further rejection by preventive strike. Spiky.
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SPOILERS!!
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The first half of this book feels raw; but this can only be the illusion created by the rough language, the short sentences, the baldness, the bleakness of her life reflected in terse, sparse prose. This brings startling, swirling effects when contrasted with the rhythms of the King James Bible or John Donne. For the story that is skirted and prodded at here is the material of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, published 26 years ago. She calls Oranges the cover version. "I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it." Here is the painful story, the one that no-one could survive. Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother, called Mrs Winterson throughout the book, was a fervent convert to the Elim Pentecostal Church who believed and declared that Satan had led her to the wrong crib, who read Jane Eyre to Jeanette, but changed the ending so that Jane married sanctimonious St John Rivers and went on missionary work with him, who burnt the books hidden under Jeanette's mattress because "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," who locked Jeanette out all night,who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, who believed Jeanette's sexuality was a demon to be exorcised.
The second half of the book IS raw. It is written in real time, as Jeanette Winterson rides out the storm of a complete breakdown, steadfastly waiting huddled below a wall outside her house in the country, looking at the view and waiting for the pain to pass. A new relationship with the writer and psychologist Susie Orbach and the search for her birth mother drags her out of despair, but equally harrowing is the Kafkaesque tale of how bureaucracy throws stumbling blocks in the path of that search. When she does find her birth mother, there is a strong sense of her having to re-calibrate her life to accommodate not only a mother but half siblings too. She ends "I have no idea what happens next."
Throughout, what shines through is survival through literature, and the complexity of feeling that allows the reader to feel sympathy for the ineffective father and even for the monstrous Mrs Winterson. There are ripples of delightful humour among the bleak:
The only time that Mrs Winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the Mormons were coming round. Then she waited in the lobby, and before they had dropped the knocker she had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation. This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job.
The title, by the way, is the real question asked by Mrs Winterson when Jeanette walked out at the age of sixteen in order to be happy with her first girlfriend, Janey. What mother does not want her child to be happy?
**********************************
SPOILERS!!
**********************************
The first half of this book feels raw; but this can only be the illusion created by the rough language, the short sentences, the baldness, the bleakness of her life reflected in terse, sparse prose. This brings startling, swirling effects when contrasted with the rhythms of the King James Bible or John Donne. For the story that is skirted and prodded at here is the material of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, published 26 years ago. She calls Oranges the cover version. "I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it." Here is the painful story, the one that no-one could survive. Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother, called Mrs Winterson throughout the book, was a fervent convert to the Elim Pentecostal Church who believed and declared that Satan had led her to the wrong crib, who read Jane Eyre to Jeanette, but changed the ending so that Jane married sanctimonious St John Rivers and went on missionary work with him, who burnt the books hidden under Jeanette's mattress because "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," who locked Jeanette out all night,who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, who believed Jeanette's sexuality was a demon to be exorcised.
The second half of the book IS raw. It is written in real time, as Jeanette Winterson rides out the storm of a complete breakdown, steadfastly waiting huddled below a wall outside her house in the country, looking at the view and waiting for the pain to pass. A new relationship with the writer and psychologist Susie Orbach and the search for her birth mother drags her out of despair, but equally harrowing is the Kafkaesque tale of how bureaucracy throws stumbling blocks in the path of that search. When she does find her birth mother, there is a strong sense of her having to re-calibrate her life to accommodate not only a mother but half siblings too. She ends "I have no idea what happens next."
Throughout, what shines through is survival through literature, and the complexity of feeling that allows the reader to feel sympathy for the ineffective father and even for the monstrous Mrs Winterson. There are ripples of delightful humour among the bleak:
The only time that Mrs Winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the Mormons were coming round. Then she waited in the lobby, and before they had dropped the knocker she had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation. This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job.
The title, by the way, is the real question asked by Mrs Winterson when Jeanette walked out at the age of sixteen in order to be happy with her first girlfriend, Janey. What mother does not want her child to be happy?
March 24, 2020
★★★★★
Conocer a Jeanette ha supuesto un auténtico placer y desafío literario. En este libro he encontrado un gran ejemplo de la dualidad de sentimientos (amor/odio) hacia un familiar y como hay personas que no saben amar porque no han sido amadas. Lo difícil que puede resultar dar amor o aceptar recibirlo cuando nunca te lo han dado y ni siquiera mostrado.
Jeannette Winterson fue dada en adopción a las seis semanas de vida y fue a parar a manos de una pareja de fanáticos religiosos extremistas. Desde bien pequeña es tratada con suma dureza, la castigan dejándola durmiendo en la calle o en las escaleras y llegan a hacerle un exorcismo cuando conocen su orientación sexual. Aún así acepta su destino y busca la manera de disfrutar de lo único que la hace feliz y encima tiene prohibido: leer.
Tal es la crudeza de sus vivencias que he sentido opresión en el pecho durante su lectura. Jeannette habla sin tapujos de su infancia, sus sentimientos, su sexualidad e incluso de que escucha voces. Nos habla del amor y de la incapacidad de amar o de no saber cómo hacerlo y lo frustrante que resulta para ella.
Siempre me motiva conocer la vida de otras mujeres y cómo ha sido el camino recorrido hasta la escritura del libro en cuestión. En esta ocasión, me he sentido reflejada en sus reflexiones y emociones vividas. Me ha hecho sentir mucho, pensar y dejarme llevar por su preciosa e impresionante prosa. La autora tiene un gran control y una serenidad envidiable en su narración, el tempo del relato es acertado, las descripciones correctas y su drama brilla en profundidad.
Creo que siento una debilidad por los libros que tratan la relación madre e hija, por mis vivencias personales o porque mi inconsciente me lleva a ellos. He disfrutado enormemente de cada una de sus páginas, de la pasión con la que escribe, como se desnuda y como nos deja formar parte de su relato tan revelador y sensible. Altamente recomendable.
«La señora Winterson era un monstruo, pero era mi monstruo». Cuánta razón y cuánto puedo llegar a entenderte querida Jeannette.
Conocer a Jeanette ha supuesto un auténtico placer y desafío literario. En este libro he encontrado un gran ejemplo de la dualidad de sentimientos (amor/odio) hacia un familiar y como hay personas que no saben amar porque no han sido amadas. Lo difícil que puede resultar dar amor o aceptar recibirlo cuando nunca te lo han dado y ni siquiera mostrado.
Jeannette Winterson fue dada en adopción a las seis semanas de vida y fue a parar a manos de una pareja de fanáticos religiosos extremistas. Desde bien pequeña es tratada con suma dureza, la castigan dejándola durmiendo en la calle o en las escaleras y llegan a hacerle un exorcismo cuando conocen su orientación sexual. Aún así acepta su destino y busca la manera de disfrutar de lo único que la hace feliz y encima tiene prohibido: leer.
Tal es la crudeza de sus vivencias que he sentido opresión en el pecho durante su lectura. Jeannette habla sin tapujos de su infancia, sus sentimientos, su sexualidad e incluso de que escucha voces. Nos habla del amor y de la incapacidad de amar o de no saber cómo hacerlo y lo frustrante que resulta para ella.
Siempre me motiva conocer la vida de otras mujeres y cómo ha sido el camino recorrido hasta la escritura del libro en cuestión. En esta ocasión, me he sentido reflejada en sus reflexiones y emociones vividas. Me ha hecho sentir mucho, pensar y dejarme llevar por su preciosa e impresionante prosa. La autora tiene un gran control y una serenidad envidiable en su narración, el tempo del relato es acertado, las descripciones correctas y su drama brilla en profundidad.
Creo que siento una debilidad por los libros que tratan la relación madre e hija, por mis vivencias personales o porque mi inconsciente me lleva a ellos. He disfrutado enormemente de cada una de sus páginas, de la pasión con la que escribe, como se desnuda y como nos deja formar parte de su relato tan revelador y sensible. Altamente recomendable.
«La señora Winterson era un monstruo, pero era mi monstruo». Cuánta razón y cuánto puedo llegar a entenderte querida Jeannette.
September 16, 2021
Writing is mostly an act that functions to enamor us with the new, with the unexplored, the un-trodden upon. A special trait of Winterson's writing across all her books is that it's always a return - to initial causes, to the conditions of crisis. Through her writing she struggles to make peace with the atemporal nature of pain. She tries to systematically index trauma only to accept its refusal to be categorised. All of her writing is a push-and-pull, a persistence within resistance.
Another thing I've discovered in all of her books I've read so far is that they're all love letters. Oranges was a love letter to acceptance, Sexing the cherry was a love letter to time, and this book is a love letter to herself. A return is a painful act in and of itself, but to try to pen it down in a memoir is like willfully diving into the depths of a lake whose surface is rock-solid frozen. You have to hope your body is capable of surving it.
In this book Winterson traces a breakdown of the discreteness of the self, a rupture from her sense of wholeness that stems from realizing that the self is a continuity that creates its own force field and is reinforced by interaction with the environment. Her love for writing and poetry shines through. She sought to remedy her own isolation by trying to access the world of symbolic representation that precedes language. As I read her accounts of growing up as a queer, working class woman in a traumatic household and with the knowledge of circumstances of her adoption and the solace she found in words, I was reminded of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote I love a lot - "language is fossil poetry."
But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place.
Where are you?
Another thing I've discovered in all of her books I've read so far is that they're all love letters. Oranges was a love letter to acceptance, Sexing the cherry was a love letter to time, and this book is a love letter to herself. A return is a painful act in and of itself, but to try to pen it down in a memoir is like willfully diving into the depths of a lake whose surface is rock-solid frozen. You have to hope your body is capable of surving it.
In this book Winterson traces a breakdown of the discreteness of the self, a rupture from her sense of wholeness that stems from realizing that the self is a continuity that creates its own force field and is reinforced by interaction with the environment. Her love for writing and poetry shines through. She sought to remedy her own isolation by trying to access the world of symbolic representation that precedes language. As I read her accounts of growing up as a queer, working class woman in a traumatic household and with the knowledge of circumstances of her adoption and the solace she found in words, I was reminded of the Ralph Waldo Emerson quote I love a lot - "language is fossil poetry."
But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place.
Where are you?
March 29, 2021
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, published twenty-six years after the author's semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a non-fiction memoir. It brings out in the open what had lain under the surface in the novel. I see Jeanette Winterson as being very strong, as having learned much from life. The troubles of her past have been worked through and resolved before the writing of this book. She is a woman I admire. Listening to what life has taught her is not time wasted.
We are told of Jeanette’s adoptive mother—a Pentecostal evangelical Christian of the most extreme type. An unhappy woman in an unhappy marriage. We learn of her submissive adoptive father, the discovery of Jeanette’s biological parents and her sexual and emotional attraction toward women. Jeanette’s relationships and how they have shaped her personality are what this book is all about. Jeanette’s family circumstances are not of the ordinary….but whose life is?!
Jeanette does not bemoan what life has thrown at her. She is looking for neither sympathy nor pity. Her presentation is straightforward, not pushy. She has resolved her issues and speaks of what she has learned. We can agree or discard her conclusions as we so wish. Wit and dry humor pepper the prose. Do you see the humor in the book’s title? There is strength, a punch, an optimism in her tone that I like. I like the prose very much.
Jeanette’s adoptive mother burned her books. Jeanette had to read in secret. Learning first to read from the Bible, taught her, shaped her vocabulary and how to string together words. Life stamps us in unexpected ways.
This book works well for those who are adopted, as well as for those who are not but want to get a glimpse into what being adopted might be like. This book works equally well for the heterosexual and the homosexual. Emotional relationships concern all of us. Jeanette unabashedly speaks of her past. What she has lived through has not destroyed her; it has made her strong.
The author narrates the audiobook. She does it well. Her voice is strong and clear. Her personality and strength of character is mirrored in her tone of voice. Four stars for the audio narration.
I want to read more by this author. She has a knack for words. She expresses her thoughts cogently. She is an intelligent woman. Her ideas interest me.
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*Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 4 stars
*The Gap of Time maybe
We are told of Jeanette’s adoptive mother—a Pentecostal evangelical Christian of the most extreme type. An unhappy woman in an unhappy marriage. We learn of her submissive adoptive father, the discovery of Jeanette’s biological parents and her sexual and emotional attraction toward women. Jeanette’s relationships and how they have shaped her personality are what this book is all about. Jeanette’s family circumstances are not of the ordinary….but whose life is?!
Jeanette does not bemoan what life has thrown at her. She is looking for neither sympathy nor pity. Her presentation is straightforward, not pushy. She has resolved her issues and speaks of what she has learned. We can agree or discard her conclusions as we so wish. Wit and dry humor pepper the prose. Do you see the humor in the book’s title? There is strength, a punch, an optimism in her tone that I like. I like the prose very much.
Jeanette’s adoptive mother burned her books. Jeanette had to read in secret. Learning first to read from the Bible, taught her, shaped her vocabulary and how to string together words. Life stamps us in unexpected ways.
This book works well for those who are adopted, as well as for those who are not but want to get a glimpse into what being adopted might be like. This book works equally well for the heterosexual and the homosexual. Emotional relationships concern all of us. Jeanette unabashedly speaks of her past. What she has lived through has not destroyed her; it has made her strong.
The author narrates the audiobook. She does it well. Her voice is strong and clear. Her personality and strength of character is mirrored in her tone of voice. Four stars for the audio narration.
I want to read more by this author. She has a knack for words. She expresses her thoughts cogently. She is an intelligent woman. Her ideas interest me.
**************************
*Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? 4 stars
*The Gap of Time maybe
January 4, 2016
Review by Zoe Williams, The Guardian - she says perfectly exactly how I felt about this memoir.
"Jeanette Winterson's memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it's almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. 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. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first half is a ruse; that, in a Lilliputian fashion, what appears to be a straight narrative of her early life is actually tying the reader down with a thousand imperceptible guy ropes, so that when she unleashes a terrible sorrow, there is no escaping it and no looking away.
"Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful). There are passages and phrases that will be recognisable to anyone who's read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: this is not surprising, since that first, bold announcement of Winterson's talent was a roman à clef, and never claimed to be otherwise.
So anecdotes and jokes crop up in both books: the mother says the lesbian sweet-shop owners deal in "unnatural passions", and the young Jeanette thinks it means they put chemicals in their sweets; the gospel tent, the CB radio, all the memorable details of the first fictional outing come up again, but the point is not that this is repetitive. Rather, that the documents are intended as companions, to lay this one over the last like tracing paper, so that even if the author poetically denies the possibility of an absolute truth, there emerges nevertheless the shape of the things that actually happened. I had forgotten how upbeat Oranges was; it may have been peopled by eccentrics, with a heroine held in alienation by the aspic of impotent childhood, but there were upsides. "I suppose the saddest thing for me," Winterson writes now, "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."
The upbringing as she tells it now is far bleaker; she was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. However, the story's leavened throughout by other observations. The geopolitics I sometimes found bold, and other times found too broad to be conclusive: "In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?" But it wriggles with humour, even as Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard." There is Winterson's quirky favourite hymn ("Cheer up ye saints of God," it starts, "There is nothing to worry about"), her loving, impressionistic descriptions of classic authors, from TS Eliot to Gertrude Stein, as she first encounters them. And even with all this new, distressing detail, the story of her childhood ends well – it ends in escape.
Then there's an odd page or two entitled "Intermission", which finishes: "The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can't write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact … I am going to miss out 25 years … Maybe later …"
And suddenly we are on to territory which is alarming, moving, at times genuinely terrifying; skip forward a quarter century, and Winterson has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in the effects of her dad, when he's moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." At times she describes the process with precision. Other times, though, the scars of this first abandonment are given in the most unadorned, uncharacteristic prose, as though she's trying to gnaw her way through her own sophistication to get to the truth of it. In a way, the presence in the narrative of Susie Orbach, with whom Winterson started a relationship just before she started looking for her birth mother, acts as a reassurance to the reader as much as to the author, a fixed point to whom we can return, whose very inclusion means that, whatever happens, a fresh abandonment won't be the outcome. Otherwise I genuinely think it would be unbearable. At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears.
There is much here that's impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one's sympathy, for everyone involved, so that the characters who are demons at the start – her adoptive mother but also, to a degree, her acquiescent adoptive father – emerge, by the end, as simply, catastrophically damaged. In the process of uncovering that, she painstakingly unpicks the damage they wreaked on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is, in this sense, more important and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother."
20 November 2011
"Jeanette Winterson's memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it's almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. 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. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first half is a ruse; that, in a Lilliputian fashion, what appears to be a straight narrative of her early life is actually tying the reader down with a thousand imperceptible guy ropes, so that when she unleashes a terrible sorrow, there is no escaping it and no looking away.
"Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful). There are passages and phrases that will be recognisable to anyone who's read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: this is not surprising, since that first, bold announcement of Winterson's talent was a roman à clef, and never claimed to be otherwise.
So anecdotes and jokes crop up in both books: the mother says the lesbian sweet-shop owners deal in "unnatural passions", and the young Jeanette thinks it means they put chemicals in their sweets; the gospel tent, the CB radio, all the memorable details of the first fictional outing come up again, but the point is not that this is repetitive. Rather, that the documents are intended as companions, to lay this one over the last like tracing paper, so that even if the author poetically denies the possibility of an absolute truth, there emerges nevertheless the shape of the things that actually happened. I had forgotten how upbeat Oranges was; it may have been peopled by eccentrics, with a heroine held in alienation by the aspic of impotent childhood, but there were upsides. "I suppose the saddest thing for me," Winterson writes now, "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."
The upbringing as she tells it now is far bleaker; she was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. However, the story's leavened throughout by other observations. The geopolitics I sometimes found bold, and other times found too broad to be conclusive: "In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?" But it wriggles with humour, even as Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard." There is Winterson's quirky favourite hymn ("Cheer up ye saints of God," it starts, "There is nothing to worry about"), her loving, impressionistic descriptions of classic authors, from TS Eliot to Gertrude Stein, as she first encounters them. And even with all this new, distressing detail, the story of her childhood ends well – it ends in escape.
Then there's an odd page or two entitled "Intermission", which finishes: "The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can't write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact … I am going to miss out 25 years … Maybe later …"
And suddenly we are on to territory which is alarming, moving, at times genuinely terrifying; skip forward a quarter century, and Winterson has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in the effects of her dad, when he's moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." At times she describes the process with precision. Other times, though, the scars of this first abandonment are given in the most unadorned, uncharacteristic prose, as though she's trying to gnaw her way through her own sophistication to get to the truth of it. In a way, the presence in the narrative of Susie Orbach, with whom Winterson started a relationship just before she started looking for her birth mother, acts as a reassurance to the reader as much as to the author, a fixed point to whom we can return, whose very inclusion means that, whatever happens, a fresh abandonment won't be the outcome. Otherwise I genuinely think it would be unbearable. At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears.
There is much here that's impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one's sympathy, for everyone involved, so that the characters who are demons at the start – her adoptive mother but also, to a degree, her acquiescent adoptive father – emerge, by the end, as simply, catastrophically damaged. In the process of uncovering that, she painstakingly unpicks the damage they wreaked on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is, in this sense, more important and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother."
20 November 2011
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