sedeara 's review for:

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

3.0

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Jeanette Winterson's prose is so beautiful in her fiction that I think I expected something more from her memoir. Although I haven't read anything since "Written on the Body," what I remember is how incredibly *vivid* that book was in terms of sensory details. "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" lacks that, and it feels like an inordinate amount of time is spent inside Jeanette's own head, following her various interpretations or philosophies regarding her life. Her life is incredibly interesting, in equal parts horrifying, sad, and humorous, as she writes about her relationship with a fundamentalist mother whose unhappiness infected everyone around her. She references her novel, "Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" quite often, which I haven't read, but which is mostly autobiographical. In some sense, I feel that this book was somewhat sparse because she felt like she'd already covered a lot of this ground in fiction; the main story she seems to want to tell here is the one about meeting her birthmother, which is compelling. But I think my biggest "takeaway" from this memoir was my admiration of Jeanette's ability to cope and thrive despite her life circumstances, which include leaving home at 16 because her mother couldn't deal with her homosexuality. I also appreciated the honest, nuanced insight it offered into the life of a child who grew up in an adoptive family.