kristennm1972 's review for:

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

3.0

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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is an unusual read. It is one of the most meta pieces of writing I've ever read--lots of writing about writing and writing about reading. It is distinctly non-narrative, jumping around in time and criss-crossing genres, from memoir to philosophy to political commentary. Winterson admits she is "uncertain of continuous narrative," a product of a tumultuous, abusive upbringing that left her "collecting the scraps." While I didn't enjoy this book as much overall as I thought I would, I did highlight as I read some nuggets about how to approach life: "Some people cope better than others with adversity--I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love of the self, however found. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream..." Other favorites include "Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness. Revenge and Tragedy often happen together. Forgiveness redeems the past. Forgiveness unblocks the future...." and a wonderful anecdote about being lost while driving from Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, which ends with Gertrude saying, "Right or wrong, this is the road, and we are on it." What I found most offputting about the book were the author's (negative) generalizations about the experience of being adopted--she seems to consider adoptees a monolithic group. Toward the end, she does write, "My friends who are not adopted tell me not to worry. They don't feel they were 'right' either." While this may be a "glass-is-half-empty" take, I think it gets at the truth. We all have our own stories to make sense of. We are all trying to get comfortable in our own skin.