greenmtgirl 's review for:

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

5.0

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Jeanette often refers to her mother as "Mrs Winterson." She's often not human enough to warrant the use of the word mother; she lives in End Time, has possibly never consummated her marriage and certainly never sleeps in the same bed as her husband, and constantly tells her adopted daughter that they only picked her out at the orphanage because Satan led them to the wrong crib. The child Jeanette is formed as a person by the abuse, neglect, and surpassing weirdness of her adoptive mother, but most of all by the lack of love, and love - salvific, grounding love - becomes the theme of adult Jeanette's personal quest and literary career. The redemptive, saving power of both love and literature are major themes of the book, but everything is framed by the trauma of life with mother, and the later attempt to come to terms with being given up for adoption, being mothered by someone without the slightest maternal instinct or skill, and being thrown out of the house as a culmination of years of being locked out of that same house.

Jeanette has here the same mystical but unflinchingly honest prose style as in her novels. This is more a spiritual autobiography than memoir as it's usually understood. Many years and many events are passed over without comment. What matters is the author's quest for love after deep wounding, the literature that becomes her lifeline, the madness she faces later in life, and the way literature saves her again. That, and a very loving girlfriend.

I'm so glad I bought this in hardcover, as I see myself returning to it again and again.