Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

4.2 4.2 out of 5 stars | 1,231 ratings

Price: 17.5

Last update: 11-13-2024


About this item

Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most acclaimed books of the last three decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is considered one of the most important books in contemporary fiction. Jeanette’s adoptive mother loomed over her life until Jeanette finally moved out at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. As Jeanette left behind the strict confines of her youth, her mother asked, “Why be happy when you could be normal?”

This memoir is the chronicle of a life’s work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser drawer; about growing up in a north England industrial town in the 1960s and 1970s; and about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about literature, one that shows how fiction and poetry can guide us when we are lost. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging - for love, identity, and a home.


Top reviews from the United States

maryanne
5.0 out of 5 stars Best Adoption Memoir in recent years
Reviewed in the United States on June 19, 2012
I love this book! Ms. Winterson is a beautiful and skilled British writer, so rare in adoption memoirs, and her life is a harrowing tale of a soul battered but not broken by a deeply abusive childhood and difficult life. The title comes from something her adoptive mother, whom she always refers to as "Mrs. Winterson,", said to teenaged Jeanette when she said being a lesbian and loving women made her happy. Mrs. Winterson replied, "why be happy when you can be normal"? That sums up one of the worst adoptive moms ever very well. The irony is that Mrs. Winterson was far from "normal" herself.

Jeanette's generosity of spirit comes through in her embrace of the better parts of a severely Fundamentalist religious upbringing by a mentally ill adoptive mother and passive father, and her attempts at understanding and forgiveness of things that seem unforgivable. The ghosts of this past almost destroy her, but she emerges a survivor who loves and embraces life and refuses to settle for life without passion. She is a woman capable of introspection, growth, and wit, even in the political realm, as shown in her initial embrace of Margaret Thatcher and later rejection of her policies. This is a book about so much more than adoption, but the deep inner pain of being an adoptee who was never accepted for herself in a poor and dysfunctional family is always at the core.

This may sound grim, but it is not the story of a whining victim nor of a person who blames everyone else for her ills. That Jeanette got out of that life at 16 and got a degree from Oxford University by sheer force of will and desire is a tribute to her inner strength, despite dealing with adoption issues and her sexuality which was soundly condemned by her church and parents. Her story is told with as much humour as pathos, and shows her plucky and hopeful attitude even in the worst of times.

Yes, she searched, reunited with her birth mother, was fully accepted, but that was not the happy ending either; in fact, the book does not end but leaves the future open, as it is. Like many adoptees, Jeanette does not feel fully at home in either family, despite the warm welcome from her birth mother and other kin. But she has reached a place of enough self-awareness to make her own home with her partner and her books and her vivid and life-saving imagination. She has endured and prevailed despite crushing obstacles.

I identified with her love of literature and poetry, and how books opened the world to her as a lonely child who was not allowed any safe place of her own. I admired her skill and grace in telling her story, and in explaining how no story is literally true but an attempt to make sense and order of the chaos that is life. We need more books with this level of insight and complexity to do justice to the adoptee story.

This is the best adoption memoir I have read since B.J. Lifton's work, and I recommend it to all.
Frank
4.0 out of 5 stars An Inspirational and Real Book
Reviewed in the United States on February 25, 2013
Jeanette Winterson has such a command of mixing complex intellectual and spiritual ideas with concrete and real language and situations. For me, personally, this book helped a lot. The way Ms. Winterson discusses her mental health towards the end of the book was really interesting and inspiring. She has some great words about overcoming adversity and how creativity is linked with the search for health.

One thing I thought the booked lacked was a description of her writing books like Sexing the Cherry and Gut Symmetries. She mostly writes about her years growing up, her early college years, and then her recent life with her birth family.

She writes here with her trademark style. She uses her approach to non-linear time as she talks about her life and coming of age. This book really gives a glimpse at how and why Ms. Winterson is the way she is, and writes the way she does.

I think her life and views are extremely inspirational. She discusses Christianity, general spirituality, writing, literature, and life with clear honesty. She doesn't write with an all or nothing mentality, either. She acknowledges both the positives, negatives, and different shades of her experiences in a very open way.

On the whole, I felt like this book really helped encourage me personally and spiritually. And it was extremely inspiring to hear how she can be so smart, yet so humble and non judgmental, and still very real.
Laura Booksnob
5.0 out of 5 stars A deeply passionate, personal memoir.
Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2013
"Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home-they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep." pg. 61

Jeanette Winterson grew up in an unhappy, abusive, and religious Pentecostal family. She was adopted at a young age and her mother planned to mold her into a missionary of God. Yet Jeanette heard time and time again that her parents were led to the wrong crib. Jeanette grew up with the knowledge that she never really belonged. She didn't belong to her adoptive parents, she didn't belong to her birth parents, she didn't belong to her public school because she was so religious and she didn't belong to her church because she was a lesbian. She spent many nights outside, alone on her doorstep.

She was kicked out of her home at the age of 16 and was homeless living in her car. Growing up, books were forbidden in her house and so the library became a haven and she began to read every author from A to Z in English Literature. She applied to Oxford and to her surprise got in as the "working class" experiment. Jeanette then writes her first book, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, when she was 24. Some words of advice: Read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit before you read this book. It will make a big difference.

I once heard that if you don't deal with the trauma of your past, that the trauma will find you and make you deal with it. Well that is what happened to Jeanette. She sunk into a type of madness, became depressed and emerged forever changed. When Jeanette decides to go on with her life she then makes the decision to find her birth mother.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is an amazing memoir. It is not told in a linear fashion but it is full of life and passion. Complex, yet simply told, Winterson bares her soul, telling her readers that she never learned how to love nor how to be loved. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is an explanation of her book, Oranges and a confession of a very painful past. She divulges her tumultuous past with style, wit and grace all the while showing her readers, wisdom and the strength to endure. I was so inspired and riveted to Jeanette's story and have many passages of wisdom marked in my book. This memoir is deeply personal to Winterson and to me, as the reader. I felt I was looking into the window of her soul.

"Nobody can feel too much, though many of us work very hard at feeling too little.
Feeling is frightening.
Well, I find it so."
Pg. 187

Best Sellers in

 
 

Trouble: Love Is Love, Book 2

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1794
33.25
 
 

You Better Be Lightning

4.8 4.8 out of 5 stars 651
12.25
 
 

The Paying Guests

3.7 3.7 out of 5 stars 18852
19.69
 
 

Una vida homosexual [A Homosexual Life]: Ser gay: 50 años de reflexión y aprendizaje [Being Gay: 50 Years of Reflection and L

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 105
11.14
 
 

The Steady: Lost Boys, Book 4

4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 654
17.46
 
 

Nicked: A Novel

3.8 3.8 out of 5 stars 155
13.78
 
 

Prince of Poison

4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars 602
17.46
 
 

The Pairing

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 683
21.65