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4.15 AVERAGE
4.15 AVERAGE
dark
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
emotional
inspiring
reflective
sad
An emotional exploration of family. This was a lovely, quick read. Winterson's prose is absolutely stunning.
The book's title, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal refers to the words spoken by Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother as Jeanette was being kicked out of the house at the age of sixteen for being a lesbian. Earlier in Jeanette's life, when her mother discovered her first girlfriend, she was the subject of an exorcism in front of their entire Pentecostal congregation (seriously!). Needless to say, life was difficult growing up with a fanatical born-again mother who was obsessed with the apocalypse and suffering. Some of Mrs. Winterson's (as Jeanette called her mother) actions were horrific and some were rather amusing in a sad way. Some of my favorite lines from the book were:
- About Christmas: "Most kids grow up leaving something for Santa at Christmas time, when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
- While on vacation: "My mother sat in a deck chair most of the day reading sensationalist literature about Hell."
- When a friend slept over: "Vicky was struggling. Just before Christmas she went up to bed and found that her pillowcase had no pillow in it. It was stuffed with religious tracts about the apocalypse."
Jeanette's mother heaped psychological abuse on her constantly. But our formative lives shape us in to what we are and during this time Jeanette developed a love for literature, and when her mother disallowed this Jeanette decided to write her own literature and she eventually became the acclaimed author she is now.
The latter portion of the book recounts Jeanette's search for her birth mother. This was a difficult process due to the secrecy of her adoptive family and difficulty obtaining records through the system at the time. The process was very interesting but difficult emotionally.
I listened to the audiobook read by the author. Her wit and emotions really come through on the recording and this added a lot to the experience. I would highly recommend this even if you are not yet a fan of Jeanette Winterson.
While listening to this audiobook I was reading the paper book of Alan Cumming's memoir Not My Father's Son which was also about growing up with an irrational, abusive parent. It was quite a one-two punch of gloominess.
- About Christmas: "Most kids grow up leaving something for Santa at Christmas time, when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse."
- While on vacation: "My mother sat in a deck chair most of the day reading sensationalist literature about Hell."
- When a friend slept over: "Vicky was struggling. Just before Christmas she went up to bed and found that her pillowcase had no pillow in it. It was stuffed with religious tracts about the apocalypse."
Jeanette's mother heaped psychological abuse on her constantly. But our formative lives shape us in to what we are and during this time Jeanette developed a love for literature, and when her mother disallowed this Jeanette decided to write her own literature and she eventually became the acclaimed author she is now.
The latter portion of the book recounts Jeanette's search for her birth mother. This was a difficult process due to the secrecy of her adoptive family and difficulty obtaining records through the system at the time. The process was very interesting but difficult emotionally.
I listened to the audiobook read by the author. Her wit and emotions really come through on the recording and this added a lot to the experience. I would highly recommend this even if you are not yet a fan of Jeanette Winterson.
While listening to this audiobook I was reading the paper book of Alan Cumming's memoir Not My Father's Son which was also about growing up with an irrational, abusive parent. It was quite a one-two punch of gloominess.
There 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, [b:That They May Face The Rising Sun|79930|That They May Face The Rising Sun|John McGahern|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1408925153l/79930._SY75_.jpg|1252866] 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, [b:Oranges are Not the Only Fruit|15055|Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267717580l/15055._SY75_.jpg|1411520], 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, [b:Oranges are Not the Only Fruit|15055|Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit|Jeanette Winterson|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1267717580l/15055._SY75_.jpg|1411520], 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.
This is a wonderful memoir. Exactly what you would expect of Winterson. It's funny, bleak, fantastical, devastatingly sad and beautifully written. Winterson has the ability to write about herself with both sympathy and a raw sense of honesty. I've loved her writing since the beginning and this, if you've never read Winterson before, would be amazing to read as a companion piece to Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It's got hints of Alan Bennett with her perfect ear for dialogue and the dark humour of her observations. It's got that macabre sensibility of Dylan Thomas's writing. It's all her own. It's perfect.
The autobiographical novel (Oranges Are not the Only Fruit) is better. Is great.
It's fascinating to see the same material conveyed as fiction and non-fiction. It's hard to know if the novel is that much better because of the format of because of the quality.
Definitely read the novel first. Or only.
I love the title though. It feels like a validation of all the people who reject normalcy even when it doesn't lead intuitively to happiness.
It's fascinating to see the same material conveyed as fiction and non-fiction. It's hard to know if the novel is that much better because of the format of because of the quality.
Definitely read the novel first. Or only.
I love the title though. It feels like a validation of all the people who reject normalcy even when it doesn't lead intuitively to happiness.
emotional
funny
reflective
medium-paced
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