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4.14 AVERAGE
4.14 AVERAGE
Dit boek is mijn absolute lievelingsboek en ik lees het meer als een naslagwerk (om niet te zeggen bijbel) dan als een roman. Regelmatig zoek ik stukken op, of lees ik een hoofdstuk om over na te denken. Een keer per jaar lees ik het kaft tot kaft. Absoluut onmisbare memoires over de liefde, familie, en de wil om te overleven.
reflective
slow-paced
Between laughter, tears, stunned silences, and ‘oh my gods’, I had to keep reading back over passages again and again. I have this habit of writing down impactful snippets of writing I encounter. Keeping them in notebooks to look back on later. Reliving that feeling invoked when one encounters magic in a simple sentence, or a single feeling that takes a paragraph to explain. If I had done that with this book, I would filled an entire notebook.
Here, I’ve had a unique experience. On closing the back flap and setting the book down, my next impulse is to pick it up and start again.
Here, I’ve had a unique experience. On closing the back flap and setting the book down, my next impulse is to pick it up and start again.
challenging
emotional
hopeful
reflective
medium-paced
A pursuit of happiness and self acceptance. I loved the use of humour when discussing such gritty topics.
adventurous
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
medium-paced
This is a memoir of a woman who was adopted by a fundamentalist Christian woman and her husband and raised in a very conservative, strict home. If that wasn't hard enough, Jeanette realized at a young age that she was gay, which was utterly unacceptable.
Some parts are funny, but this is a mostly sad tale of Jeanette's life and why and how she chose happiness.
Some parts are funny, but this is a mostly sad tale of Jeanette's life and why and how she chose happiness.
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
fast-paced
A kind of rapprochement....Jeanette Winterson made her name with the largely autobiographical Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and she returns to the territory in a more proprietorial style. This is autobiography not autobiographical fiction.
A difficult book, for it lays bear one of the most challenging of human transactions - infant adoption - in a first person tale which cannot be easy for an author who is so controlling of her subjects and characters. Even Oranges wasn't totally autobiography - she couldn't give away that last tiny bit of authority. As she says at the end of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 'I have no idea what happens next.'
My personal experience of this subject - and I'm about the same age as Winterson so we shared/suffered the same practices and mores of adoption procedure in the north of England during the 1960 s - is that it's an evolving story. I was about 40 before I accepted that the reason I'd been a fucked up pit of rage in my adolescence is that being given away by your mother at the age of two months is the traumatic severing of the most fundamental human bond of trust. Melodramatic but true. And no matter how loving, capable and generous the adoptive mother something is broken forever. When you have an adoptive mother like Mrs Winterson, it's something else indeed.
The monster she created in Oranges was just that and now, with both her adoptive parents dead, this seems to be an attempt both to make sense of and peace with the ghost. The first half of the book, revisiting her childhood and retelling the story that made her famous through a more mature and reflective lens is the better half. There's a forgiveness and comprehension there that is best summed up by the annoyance she felt when her birth mother appears to criticise her substitute - 'She may have been a monster, but she was my monster.'
The second half is more uneven, an understandably emotionally charged search for her biological parent and the mixed bag of feelings that a meeting produces, but it doesn't quite carry the same resonance and credibility - almost as though this were two different books, the first an autobiography, carefully self-examining and critical, the second an unedited diary. Despite this Why Be Happy... does do something to balance out the Winterson canon. For all her predilections for name-dropping and reinventing her past, she emerges as a warmer and more likeable real life person than her literary avatars suggest.
A difficult book, for it lays bear one of the most challenging of human transactions - infant adoption - in a first person tale which cannot be easy for an author who is so controlling of her subjects and characters. Even Oranges wasn't totally autobiography - she couldn't give away that last tiny bit of authority. As she says at the end of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 'I have no idea what happens next.'
My personal experience of this subject - and I'm about the same age as Winterson so we shared/suffered the same practices and mores of adoption procedure in the north of England during the 1960 s - is that it's an evolving story. I was about 40 before I accepted that the reason I'd been a fucked up pit of rage in my adolescence is that being given away by your mother at the age of two months is the traumatic severing of the most fundamental human bond of trust. Melodramatic but true. And no matter how loving, capable and generous the adoptive mother something is broken forever. When you have an adoptive mother like Mrs Winterson, it's something else indeed.
The monster she created in Oranges was just that and now, with both her adoptive parents dead, this seems to be an attempt both to make sense of and peace with the ghost. The first half of the book, revisiting her childhood and retelling the story that made her famous through a more mature and reflective lens is the better half. There's a forgiveness and comprehension there that is best summed up by the annoyance she felt when her birth mother appears to criticise her substitute - 'She may have been a monster, but she was my monster.'
The second half is more uneven, an understandably emotionally charged search for her biological parent and the mixed bag of feelings that a meeting produces, but it doesn't quite carry the same resonance and credibility - almost as though this were two different books, the first an autobiography, carefully self-examining and critical, the second an unedited diary. Despite this Why Be Happy... does do something to balance out the Winterson canon. For all her predilections for name-dropping and reinventing her past, she emerges as a warmer and more likeable real life person than her literary avatars suggest.