Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most acclaimed books of the last three 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 considered one of the most important books in contemporary fiction. Jeanette’s adoptive mother loomed over her life until Jeanette finally moved out at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. As Jeanette left behind the strict confines of her youth, her mother asked, “Why be happy when you could be normal?” This memoir is the chronicle of a life’s work to find happiness. It is 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 drawer; about growing up in a north England industrial town in the 1960s and 1970s; and about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about literature, one that shows how fiction and poetry can guide us when we are lost. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging — for love, identity, and a home.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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WINNER 2012 – Independent Booksellers’ Week Book Award (Adult Category)
WINNER 2012 – Stonewall Awards Writer of the Year
FINALIST 2012 – South Bank Sky Arts Awards—Literature Award
LONGLISTED 2011 – Green Carnation Prize
FINALIST 2013 – ABA Indies Choice Book Awards
FINALIST 2013 – Lambda Literary Lesbian Memoir/Biography Award
“A fierce and funny exploration of her past and of what it means to belong.”
—The Telegraph
“At every turn . . . her fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration.”
—The New York Times
“She writes in flights of poetry. . . . She is equally deft with straightforward prose, in which she makes sharp, wry observations on her myriad themes—love, sex, technology, society, art, the life and death of the spirit.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Blazingly good.”
—Daily Mail
“Arguably the finest and most hopeful memoir to emerge in many years, and, as such, it really should not be missed.”
—The Times
“Breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty and vigorous all at once.... Powerful.”
—Financial Times
“Remarkable…. Brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and a generous one.”
—The Spectator --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
WINNER 2012 – Stonewall Awards Writer of the Year
FINALIST 2012 – South Bank Sky Arts Awards—Literature Award
LONGLISTED 2011 – Green Carnation Prize
FINALIST 2013 – ABA Indies Choice Book Awards
FINALIST 2013 – Lambda Literary Lesbian Memoir/Biography Award
“A fierce and funny exploration of her past and of what it means to belong.”
—The Telegraph
“At every turn . . . her fresh, vivid way of putting things stops one dead in admiration.”
—The New York Times
“She writes in flights of poetry. . . . She is equally deft with straightforward prose, in which she makes sharp, wry observations on her myriad themes—love, sex, technology, society, art, the life and death of the spirit.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“Blazingly good.”
—Daily Mail
“Arguably the finest and most hopeful memoir to emerge in many years, and, as such, it really should not be missed.”
—The Times
“Breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty and vigorous all at once.... Powerful.”
—Financial Times
“Remarkable…. Brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and a generous one.”
—The Spectator --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Born in Manchester in 1959 and adopted into a family of Pentecostal evangelists, Jeanette Winterson studied at Oxford University. Her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was selected by Michael Cunningham as one of the Good Men Project’s Best LGBT Books of All Time. Her other books include Sexing the Cherry and The Passion. Jeanette has won several prizes including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewllyn Rhys Prize, and the E. M. Forster Award.
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Most helpful customer reviews
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Ever since my very dear friend Marc quoted from Jeanette Winterson's "Sexing the cherry"("No safety without risk, and what you risk reveals what you value") over dinner earlier this year, which led to my reading that book and, as soon as I could get my hands on them, her other books - I have been fascinated by the way the author tells her story through her stories; genuine and utterly vulnerable,brutally honest and direct, knowing both the limit and the interconnectedness between words and feelings, hauntingly beautiful.
"Why be happy when you could be normal" follows this tradition, but transcends it with a humanity that is deeply moving. While as a reader I agreed with her statement "I do not want to cry. I am crying."(page 184), despite sitting in an open air restaurant in Toronto for lunch on a beautiful day, by page 205 she had this reader in tears ("Darling girl").
The vulnerability that Jeanette (Janet) describes as her experience as an adopted child constructing her identity is really universal: adopted or not (and I am of course not in any way belittling the specific and highly problematic additional burden that adoption may bring) we are all living our lives doing our best to create meaning and understanding for what it is all about and for what we are all about.
One of the best books I have ever read - with greatest admiration for its author: for the skill of her writing, and for the humanity she portraits.
"Why be happy when you could be normal" follows this tradition, but transcends it with a humanity that is deeply moving. While as a reader I agreed with her statement "I do not want to cry. I am crying."(page 184), despite sitting in an open air restaurant in Toronto for lunch on a beautiful day, by page 205 she had this reader in tears ("Darling girl").
The vulnerability that Jeanette (Janet) describes as her experience as an adopted child constructing her identity is really universal: adopted or not (and I am of course not in any way belittling the specific and highly problematic additional burden that adoption may bring) we are all living our lives doing our best to create meaning and understanding for what it is all about and for what we are all about.
One of the best books I have ever read - with greatest admiration for its author: for the skill of her writing, and for the humanity she portraits.
By Dorothyanne Brown
TOP 500 REVIEWER
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book - I bought it because of the title, primarily. Inside, I found a surprisingly endearing, warm, wonderful story of family and growing up and finding ones way.
If I read a book and decide I won't read it again, no matter how much I like it, I release it to the wild - donate it, give it to the library, sell it. I have a hardcover version of this book, which means in moving, it would be on the first to go list.
It's carefully packed. This book is a keeper for me, and a re-reader. It touched my heart.
If I read a book and decide I won't read it again, no matter how much I like it, I release it to the wild - donate it, give it to the library, sell it. I have a hardcover version of this book, which means in moving, it would be on the first to go list.
It's carefully packed. This book is a keeper for me, and a re-reader. It touched my heart.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By Andre Gerard
Format:Hardcover
In the October 28th Guardian, Jeanette has an essay which retells the opening of Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal? The retelling is as riveting as the original. In essay and book, Winterson portrays herself as a survivor. Her childhood reads like the darker parts of some Grimms fairytale, even if her telling of the story is often lightened by empathy. Here, for instance, is a description of her often abusive, book-burning, foster mother.
"She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."
A later passage reads:
"Babies are frightening - raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body - her own, my dad's, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mixture of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort. Then suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body. A burping, vomiting, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life."
Jeanette makes it hard not to feel some sympathy, even for twisted Mrs. Winterson.
Like many patremoirs, Winterson's matremoir is as much about the power of storytelling as it is about the parent. Good writers know how words create reality, and when writing about their parents, they are also acutely aware of how "Truth for anyone is a very complex thing." Also, as Jeanette goes on to say, "For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include." Much of the essay, and presumably the book, is about how Jeanette used books and words to survive and alter the darkness of her world. For her, "Stories are compensatory."
One last quotation from the essay, and then I'm off to try to find a copy of the book:
"Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear ... Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world."
Andre Gerard
Editor of Fathers: A Literary Anthology
"She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."
A later passage reads:
"Babies are frightening - raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body - her own, my dad's, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mixture of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort. Then suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body. A burping, vomiting, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life."
Jeanette makes it hard not to feel some sympathy, even for twisted Mrs. Winterson.
Like many patremoirs, Winterson's matremoir is as much about the power of storytelling as it is about the parent. Good writers know how words create reality, and when writing about their parents, they are also acutely aware of how "Truth for anyone is a very complex thing." Also, as Jeanette goes on to say, "For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include." Much of the essay, and presumably the book, is about how Jeanette used books and words to survive and alter the darkness of her world. For her, "Stories are compensatory."
One last quotation from the essay, and then I'm off to try to find a copy of the book:
"Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear ... Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world."
Andre Gerard
Editor of Fathers: A Literary Anthology
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4.2 out of 5 stars
Most recent customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Extremely Readable
I had read "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" years ago in my early twenties and I felt rather so-so about it, but the book popped back into my head again recently and I picked up... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Julia
4.0 out of 5 stars
Recommended
This is an oddly engrossing book. The first bit seemed sort of thrown together, and could have used a more thorough edit, but the rest was a page-turner. Read more
Published 19 months ago by verity
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