annagracek 's review for:

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

5.0

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Listening to Jeanette Winterson read her memoir was a fantastic and cathartic way to enter the empty room of a new year. I think only Mary Karr’s The Liars Club affected me as deeply and permanently (I hope) as this darkly hopeful, achingly humorous tale of love and longing and belonging. Unexpectedly she gave me fresh language for the experience of being wrongly or badly mothered. But also, just as importantly, fresh language for what I know to also be true: that going in after the earliest part of yourself, the you that was left or harmed or unseen or had to hide to survive, this work is deeply connected to accessing our essential creativity. Healing ourselves shows the gold seam in the coal.