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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
A great memoir (of sorts) dealing with the idea of feeling displaced, the healing power of creativity, and figuring out the beneficial aspects of love, as well as learning to love in a new way.
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
challenging
dark
sad
fast-paced
I'm not sure how this, Jeanette Winterson's autobiography, compares with her fictional debut novel "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" which treated the same material, since I haven't read the latter. But this is a searingly, brutal and yet lyrical self-portrait. In case you don't know her story, she was adopted at 6 weeks by strict Born-Again Christians in 1950s Northern working class Britain. Her temperament was naturally at odds with those of her domineering mother, irrespective of all the madness her mother lumped on top through her warped world view. Winterson retreats into books, but the book is not a mere 'woe is me' and 'wasn't my upbringing terrible?' hatchet job on her parents. She also recalls the strengths of her upbringing, the positive out of the negative, the invention of herself in opposition. The latter part of the book, about her search for her birth mother, while heart rending, is given far less page space and while temperamentally she can see she is far closer to her birth family, she doubts she would swap what she had for an environment for what they might have offered. She speculates she may not have been forced to self-educate and discover the written word if she had grown up in a warmer family hearth.
Winterson is an arch stylist. Her language is not flashy, but it is luminous. It bleeds emotion on every page, but not messy emotion as untreated sewage, rather it is emotion beautifully couched in language and metaphor so that rather than bludgeoning us, it is more the honed blade of a stiletto knife. "But my (birth) mother had lost me and I had lost her and our other life was like a shell on the beach that holds an echo of the sea". Achingly beautiful prose that also rages with its fulminating passion.
Winterson is an arch stylist. Her language is not flashy, but it is luminous. It bleeds emotion on every page, but not messy emotion as untreated sewage, rather it is emotion beautifully couched in language and metaphor so that rather than bludgeoning us, it is more the honed blade of a stiletto knife. "But my (birth) mother had lost me and I had lost her and our other life was like a shell on the beach that holds an echo of the sea". Achingly beautiful prose that also rages with its fulminating passion.
This is a good book, I just need a break from it. I may read it eventually.
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
I never saw myself diving into memoirs, but here I am, totally hooked!
An English author Jeanette Winterson in her memoir "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" writes about her childhood (and not only, cause when you talk about your childhood it means that you also talk about your present and future) and it's really an emotional journey.
here is my review of this book:
https://khnebulishvili.wixsite.com/my-site-1/post/why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal-by-jeanette-winterson
An English author Jeanette Winterson in her memoir "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" writes about her childhood (and not only, cause when you talk about your childhood it means that you also talk about your present and future) and it's really an emotional journey.
here is my review of this book:
https://khnebulishvili.wixsite.com/my-site-1/post/why-be-happy-when-you-could-be-normal-by-jeanette-winterson