challenging emotional reflective medium-paced
holysmokesitsboo's profile picture

holysmokesitsboo's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 39%

Another school read, we’ve already finished this section and I just have no interest to continue it now. 
challenging emotional inspiring sad medium-paced
emotional hopeful reflective sad slow-paced

emilyadams18's review against another edition

DID NOT FINISH: 20%

Too rambly and prose-y

This book was many things, and it was those things beautifully. It was a love letter to books, a telling of a truly incredible life, an exploration of adoption, family, loss, vulnerability, uncertainty, femininity, and finding/learning to love. The candour with which Jeanette Winterson shares her life is touching.

I'll be honest, I read the title and thought this would be a diatribe against those who relentlessly chase happiness, but encountering the title in its context made me realize it was about choosing happiness over conformity. That was a cool recontextualization.


Absolute Favorite Quotes ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Why is the measure of love loss?"
Absolutely brilliant. Reminded me of BillyRay Belcourt's quote, "To love someone is firstiy to confess: I’m prepared to be devastated by you."
"There was a dead fox on the path I took. Not a mark on his strong red body. I moved him into the bushes. That would be enough for me too."
This has strong gen z energy.
"All my life I have worked from the wound. To heal it would mean an end to one identity — the defining identity. But the healed wound is not the disappeared wound; there will always be a scar. I will always be recognisable by my scar."
"I have no idea what happens next."
The nature of ending a memoir. Reminded me of "In The Dream House" and its ending.
"Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. She died without painkillers and in pain."
Just a brilliant sentence.
"The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feeling."
Beautiful sentiment.
[The tent] is a metaphor for this provisional life of ours – without foundations and likely to blow over. It is a romance with the elements. The wind blows, the tent billows, who here feels lost and alone? Answer – all of us.
Love this.

The role of poetry and literature -------------------------------------------------------------------
"So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. 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."
I love this anti-classist interpretation of the importance of poetry.
"Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture – exploit the new thing then move on."
Capitalism has not yet reached its grubby little fingers into literature.

Adoption --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story — of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you — and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing."
"If someone liked me, I waited until she was off guard, and then I told her I didn't want to be her friend any more. I watched the confusion and upset. The tears. Then I ran off, triumphantly in control, and very fast the triumph and the control leaked away, and then I cried and cried, because I had put myself on the outside again, on the doorstep again, where I didn't want to be."
"Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself."
Describing adoption as missing the first few pages made a lot of sense to me. It is also important to see the ways trauma continues to hurt people.

The contradictions of religion ----------------------------------------------------------------------
"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 (an exception was made for Charlton Heston as Moses in The Ten Commandments), no reading anything except devotional literature, no fancy clothes (not that we could afford them), no dancing (unless it was in church, and it was a kind of Irish jig of godly ecstasy), no pop music, no card games, no pubs – even for orange juice. TV was OK but not on Sundays. On Sundays you covered the set with a cloth."
This. There is so much good that comes from religion, so much that I miss. I miss the singing, the youth group, the shared identity, the community and its comfort. If only these things didn't come with so much baggage.

Dead bodies -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"But touching a dead body is odd – I still find it odd – the skin changes so quickly and everything shrinks. Yet I would not give up the body I love to a stranger to wash and dress. It is the last thing you can do for someone, and the last thing you can do together – both your bodies, as it used to be. No, it’s not for a stranger . . ."
I am reminded of an episode of "The Midnight Gospel", where they talk about how we are disconnected from the extremes of life, birth and death. We have sanitized and depersonalized dying, and I think there is a lot of power in preparing the body of someone special to you yourself.

Heterosexuality -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"As I pondered the horrors of heterosexuality I realised that I need not feel sorry for either of my parents;"
"Over the next few weeks we wooed each other in fonts and pixels – an email courtship that couldn't be happening, I thought, because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women. But something was going on and I had no idea what to do about it."
I just love this. "The horros of heterosexuality", "missionary work with heterosexual women".

When identity radicalizes ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
"In any case, I did not think in terms of gender or feminism, not then, because I had no wider politics other than knowing I was working class. But I had noticed that the women were fewer and further apart on the shelves, and when I tried to read books 'about' literature (always a mistake), I couldn't help noticing that the books were written by men about men who write.
That didn't worry me; I was in danger of drowning and nobody lost at sea worries about whether the spar they cling to is made of elm or oak."
"I was a woman. I was a working-class woman. I was a woman who wanted to love women without guilt or ridicule. Those three things formed the basis of my politics, not the unions, or class war as understood by the male Left."
The white left is often guilty of gate-keeping and academicizing leftism, so I love to see Jeanette talking about how her experience as a working-class woman radicalized her. The struggles of minorities are more radicalizing than any erudition.

Women -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"... men held the economic power.
The women held together the family and the community, but the invisibility of women's contribution, not measured or paid for, or socially rewarded, meant that my world was full of strong able women who were ‘housewives’ and had to defer to their men. My mother did it to my father. She held him in contempt (and that wasn't fair), but she called him the head of the household (and that wasn't true). That marital/domestic pattern was repeated everywhere I looked."
Yup.

Hearing Voices --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"We now assume that people who hear voices do terrible things; murderers and psychopaths hear voices, and so do religious fanatics and suicide bombers. But in the past, voices were respectable – desired. The visionary and the prophet, the shaman and the wise-woman. And the poet, obviously. Hearing voices can be a good thing.
Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result."
What a fascinating perspective on hearing voices that I never even thought about. I'll be sitting with this one for a little while.
"I decided that I was only prepared to talk to this savage lunatic for an hour a day – and while we were walking. She never wanted to go for a walk, but I made her."
This was when talking about the vicious disagreeable creature in her head. I like this strategy.

Miscellaneous ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"There is a lot that you can't change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey . . ."
So hopeful.
"Written on the body is a secret code only visible in certain lights."
On embodiment.
"Leaving home can only happen because there is a home to leave. And the leaving is never just a geographical or spatial separation; it is an emotional separation – wanted or unwanted. Steady or ambivalent."
"I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it."
"I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them."
Relatable.
"People’s lives are less important than procedure . . ."
Sometimes it do be like that.
"I did not realise that when money becomes the core value, then education drives towards utility or that the life of the mind will not be counted as a good unless it produces measurable results. That public services will no longer be important. That an alternative life to getting and spending will become very difficult as cheap housing disappears. That when communities are destroyed only misery and intolerance are left.
...
I did not realise the consequences of privatising society."
I will never pass up an opportunity to say f*ck capitalism.
"That there might be a level we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and a loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground."
Neat.
"I didn't know was how something as straightforward as a difference could lead to something as complex as a breakdown.
Oof.

A few other thoughts --------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The idea of uncertainty appeared several times, like how you never know what you are going to get when you start reading a book, when you adopt someone, or when you cross the threshold/hearth. I also loved how she brought a rug from house to house, making each a home. Books also served as a home. And I just have to say, Jeanette Winterson has had quite the life. Oxford, Mental asylums, clandestine romance, betrayal, etc. Finally, the idea that her mother may have been a latent lesbian really shook me. This was a great book.
challenging emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5/5


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