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schnauzermum's review against another edition
5.0
A beautifully written memoir, told with honesty and humour. Above all, it’s a book about love, loss and the saving power of literature.
caitowen26's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
nina_wintermeyer's review
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
5.0
quartzreads's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
fast-paced
4.75
spenkevich's review against another edition
5.0
‘Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love.’
‘I have written love narratives and loss narratives,’ Winterson writes, ‘it all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother.’ Jeanette Winterson’s stern adoptive mother given to religious excess casts a long shadow over her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, the title coming from a response she gave to Winterson telling her that she is happy loving another woman, and Winterson turns her perfect prose and brilliant mind that has crafted dazzling and fantastical stories inward to examine her own history. It is a harrowing exploration of the self, reading much like a companion to her exquisite and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit but going further and exploring the harsh memories that she fictionalized because she ‘wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.’ From her harsh upbringing, her breaking away and plunging into literature and, many years later, seeking out her birth mother, Winterson chronicles her life and insights into a memoir that bombards with both humor and emotional blows to deliver a memoir that is as page turning and searingly beautiful as her best novels.
Really all I want to do is get a soapbox and shout how wonderful Winterson's work is, something anyone who knows me has likely endured lately. Her works have the right combination of soaring beauty with grit and teeth. I don't know what I can accomplish here beyond recommending her, because she is an author that has totally consumed me lately and I'm so glad of it.
‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.’
Written in real time for the latter half, we can read Winterson reading herself with the writing as a therapeutic act as much as it is a literary portrait of an undeniably amazing artist. ‘I was writing the past and discovering the future,’ she says, and her faith in the written word to heal and instruct is infectiously lovely. ‘Books have always been light and warmth to me,’ and across the whole of her memoir we see several instances where books, be it reading or writing them, become an anchor as well as a ladder to climb as an escape and a path upwards to the future. When Mrs. Winterson discovers her secret stash of books—she was forbidden from reading any book beyond the three her mother okay’d—she burns them in the backyard. “‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own,’” she says, contemplating how her attempts to collect the half-burned scraps, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’ quoting from [a:T.S. Eliot|18540|T.S. Eliot|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1612500008p2/18540.jpg], came alive in her own novels that seem a collection of ‘scraps uncertain of continuous narrative.’ This book dredges up the childhood that made her works possible, and the journeys of the heart that mapped the way.
As much as books were a rock for Winterson, her own works have been a comfort for many readers to come. ‘I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,’ she says, ‘When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.’
‘Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity…Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety.’
Through these words she delivered what she refers to as a ‘cover version’ of her childhood in Oranges, with the reader discovering here that many of the events were much harsher than presented in the novel, and from it her past and relationship with her mother became bestseller stories to the general public (the book opens with a phone conversation with a horrified Mrs. Winterson after the release of the book). ‘It isn’t ‘my past’, is it,’ she states, ‘I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments,’ and examines the beauty of self-mythologizing. ‘I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact,’ she repeats across the book, which is an idea that is a root to her own novels where reality and history are blended with magical realism to become a sort of fairy tale. And what better way to examine a life and turn writing into a therapy for trauma than a storytelling medium where size and shape is often ‘approximation and unstable,’ and feeling unwanted or cast out—as she was from her own home—can become a heroic act to survive.
There is also a lot of religious trauma to survive, and Winterson examines how growing up leaving presents out for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or embroidering 'the summer has ended and we are not yet saved' on her bag certainly set her apart from her peers. But it also becomes something that attempts to alienate her from herself, attempting to make her feel shame for her very natural attraction to other women. They perform a straight up exorcism on her, it's a lot. But the real kicker is seeing, once again, love not be there when it should be. Her adopted mother, then her girlfriend who renounces her. It's a tragedy, and one far more heartbreaking than was seen in novel form.
‘A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.’
Interesting as well are Winterson’s stories of her education and eventually going to Oxford. While she says she was not a great student ‘I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.’ But if being a lesbian was what had her cast out from her childhood and shunned by her neighbors, she discovered that in academia simply being a woman was a barrier. ‘Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned,’ she writes of the books taught there, ‘it was a conspiracy of ignorance.’ An English teacher tells her ‘when a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose,’’ and during this period we see the origins of many of her critiques on gendered society and misogyny start to take shape. Not only that, but she observes how much gatekeeping pushes people out, being told on her first day that she is ‘ the working-class experiment’ while her friend is the ‘Black experiment.’ Though she sees these barriers and academic circling of the wagons as a challenge to overcome and overthrow, which is also very present in her narratives.
Something Winterson does so well in this book is keep the reader firmly gripped by the waves of prose, rocking us through anecdotes and humorous observations about a life safely behind her, so that when the storm comes we are too far out at sea to turn back and must weather the maelstrom of emotions with her. ‘There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you,’ she observes, ‘The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.’ The second half of this memoir is the real treasure. While more chaotic than the first, and admittedly written in real time, it chronicles the emotional journey of trying to find her birth mother. Following a breakup and a period of sorrow where ‘I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life,’ Jeanette takes on her quest, complete with companions who join along the way such as Susie Orbach, who would be her partner for many years (I screamed when it was revealed author [a:Ali Smith|68992|Ali Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1620558954p2/68992.jpg] told Jeanette to ‘just kiss her and see’). She learns that ‘People’s lives are less important than procedure,’ as legal hiccups thwart her and prolong the process to the point of emotional pain. But it is a beautiful tale of discovering what she needed to hear all along: ‘You were wanted, Jeanette.’ I think this beautiful sentiment makes the whole book worth reading.
‘to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater…’
The problem with real life is that it isn’t a fairy tale and there are no tidy endings. But that is also what makes it beautiful, even if tragically so. Winterson’s emotional journey is quite the tale, one that has more open ends than questions answered. I was particularly moved by her examination of a life that never was but could have been and how, even compared to the trauma of her past, she was happy to be the person she turned out to be. ‘I would rather be this me,’ she confesses, ‘than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way.’ Even to Mrs. W she observes that ‘she was a monster, but she was my monster,’ and this line has really stuck with me.
There were times when I worried it was beginning to romanticize mental health struggles and coming from a place of trauma, but right then she delivers one of the best lines in the book: ‘Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.’ She writes beautifully about how in times of mental health struggles we have to confront the creature within us, and she finds the best way for her to do so is through writing. We are all lucky to be able to observe these moments.
As much as I love her story, some of the best moments are simply Winterson talking about literature and about the ways it interacts with time and humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever underlined a book as much as this one and you will likely be finding Winterson quotes pop up in many of my reviews forever now. Here’s a taste:
This is an essential read for any Witnerson fan, but also for any lover of literature in general, and she provides an excellent list of other books to check out that were pivotal to her growth as a reader and writer. I was glad I read this directly following Oranges, and honestly this ranks with the best of her works. She has such a strong voice and the fragmentary aspects of this memoir, often told jumbled along the timeline, isn’t all that different than her novels. This is a work of startling beauty that plunges canyonous emotional depths and all I can say is Jeanette Winterson is an absolute icon. I love her, I love her works, and I can’t wait to read more.
5/5
‘The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.’
‘I have written love narratives and loss narratives,’ Winterson writes, ‘it all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother.’ Jeanette Winterson’s stern adoptive mother given to religious excess casts a long shadow over her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, the title coming from a response she gave to Winterson telling her that she is happy loving another woman, and Winterson turns her perfect prose and brilliant mind that has crafted dazzling and fantastical stories inward to examine her own history. It is a harrowing exploration of the self, reading much like a companion to her exquisite and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit but going further and exploring the harsh memories that she fictionalized because she ‘wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.’ From her harsh upbringing, her breaking away and plunging into literature and, many years later, seeking out her birth mother, Winterson chronicles her life and insights into a memoir that bombards with both humor and emotional blows to deliver a memoir that is as page turning and searingly beautiful as her best novels.
Really all I want to do is get a soapbox and shout how wonderful Winterson's work is, something anyone who knows me has likely endured lately. Her works have the right combination of soaring beauty with grit and teeth. I don't know what I can accomplish here beyond recommending her, because she is an author that has totally consumed me lately and I'm so glad of it.
‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.’
Written in real time for the latter half, we can read Winterson reading herself with the writing as a therapeutic act as much as it is a literary portrait of an undeniably amazing artist. ‘I was writing the past and discovering the future,’ she says, and her faith in the written word to heal and instruct is infectiously lovely. ‘Books have always been light and warmth to me,’ and across the whole of her memoir we see several instances where books, be it reading or writing them, become an anchor as well as a ladder to climb as an escape and a path upwards to the future. When Mrs. Winterson discovers her secret stash of books—she was forbidden from reading any book beyond the three her mother okay’d—she burns them in the backyard. “‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own,’” she says, contemplating how her attempts to collect the half-burned scraps, ‘these fragments I have shored against my ruin’ quoting from [a:T.S. Eliot|18540|T.S. Eliot|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1612500008p2/18540.jpg], came alive in her own novels that seem a collection of ‘scraps uncertain of continuous narrative.’ This book dredges up the childhood that made her works possible, and the journeys of the heart that mapped the way.
’I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.’
As much as books were a rock for Winterson, her own works have been a comfort for many readers to come. ‘I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence,’ she says, ‘When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.’
‘Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity…Home was problematic for me. It did not represent order and it did not stand for safety.’
Through these words she delivered what she refers to as a ‘cover version’ of her childhood in Oranges, with the reader discovering here that many of the events were much harsher than presented in the novel, and from it her past and relationship with her mother became bestseller stories to the general public (the book opens with a phone conversation with a horrified Mrs. Winterson after the release of the book). ‘It isn’t ‘my past’, is it,’ she states, ‘I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments,’ and examines the beauty of self-mythologizing. ‘I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact,’ she repeats across the book, which is an idea that is a root to her own novels where reality and history are blended with magical realism to become a sort of fairy tale. And what better way to examine a life and turn writing into a therapy for trauma than a storytelling medium where size and shape is often ‘approximation and unstable,’ and feeling unwanted or cast out—as she was from her own home—can become a heroic act to survive.
There is also a lot of religious trauma to survive, and Winterson examines how growing up leaving presents out for the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse or embroidering 'the summer has ended and we are not yet saved' on her bag certainly set her apart from her peers. But it also becomes something that attempts to alienate her from herself, attempting to make her feel shame for her very natural attraction to other women. They perform a straight up exorcism on her, it's a lot. But the real kicker is seeing, once again, love not be there when it should be. Her adopted mother, then her girlfriend who renounces her. It's a tragedy, and one far more heartbreaking than was seen in novel form.
‘A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.’
Interesting as well are Winterson’s stories of her education and eventually going to Oxford. While she says she was not a great student ‘I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.’ But if being a lesbian was what had her cast out from her childhood and shunned by her neighbors, she discovered that in academia simply being a woman was a barrier. ‘Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned,’ she writes of the books taught there, ‘it was a conspiracy of ignorance.’ An English teacher tells her ‘when a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose,’’ and during this period we see the origins of many of her critiques on gendered society and misogyny start to take shape. Not only that, but she observes how much gatekeeping pushes people out, being told on her first day that she is ‘ the working-class experiment’ while her friend is the ‘Black experiment.’ Though she sees these barriers and academic circling of the wagons as a challenge to overcome and overthrow, which is also very present in her narratives.
’Later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you are good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.’
Something Winterson does so well in this book is keep the reader firmly gripped by the waves of prose, rocking us through anecdotes and humorous observations about a life safely behind her, so that when the storm comes we are too far out at sea to turn back and must weather the maelstrom of emotions with her. ‘There are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you,’ she observes, ‘The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look.’ The second half of this memoir is the real treasure. While more chaotic than the first, and admittedly written in real time, it chronicles the emotional journey of trying to find her birth mother. Following a breakup and a period of sorrow where ‘I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life,’ Jeanette takes on her quest, complete with companions who join along the way such as Susie Orbach, who would be her partner for many years (I screamed when it was revealed author [a:Ali Smith|68992|Ali Smith|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1620558954p2/68992.jpg] told Jeanette to ‘just kiss her and see’). She learns that ‘People’s lives are less important than procedure,’ as legal hiccups thwart her and prolong the process to the point of emotional pain. But it is a beautiful tale of discovering what she needed to hear all along: ‘You were wanted, Jeanette.’ I think this beautiful sentiment makes the whole book worth reading.
‘to stand on the rim of your life and look down into the crater…’
The problem with real life is that it isn’t a fairy tale and there are no tidy endings. But that is also what makes it beautiful, even if tragically so. Winterson’s emotional journey is quite the tale, one that has more open ends than questions answered. I was particularly moved by her examination of a life that never was but could have been and how, even compared to the trauma of her past, she was happy to be the person she turned out to be. ‘I would rather be this me,’ she confesses, ‘than the me I might have become without books, without education, and without all the things that have happened to me along the way.’ Even to Mrs. W she observes that ‘she was a monster, but she was my monster,’ and this line has really stuck with me.
There were times when I worried it was beginning to romanticize mental health struggles and coming from a place of trauma, but right then she delivers one of the best lines in the book: ‘Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.’ She writes beautifully about how in times of mental health struggles we have to confront the creature within us, and she finds the best way for her to do so is through writing. We are all lucky to be able to observe these moments.
As much as I love her story, some of the best moments are simply Winterson talking about literature and about the ways it interacts with time and humanity. I don’t think I’ve ever underlined a book as much as this one and you will likely be finding Winterson quotes pop up in many of my reviews forever now. Here’s a taste:
'Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.’
This is an essential read for any Witnerson fan, but also for any lover of literature in general, and she provides an excellent list of other books to check out that were pivotal to her growth as a reader and writer. I was glad I read this directly following Oranges, and honestly this ranks with the best of her works. She has such a strong voice and the fragmentary aspects of this memoir, often told jumbled along the timeline, isn’t all that different than her novels. This is a work of startling beauty that plunges canyonous emotional depths and all I can say is Jeanette Winterson is an absolute icon. I love her, I love her works, and I can’t wait to read more.
5/5
‘The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.’
raqui's review against another edition
4.0
really loved reading this after reading Oranges, very interesting to see the contrast between how she tells the story in a more fictional way and then a more realistic way
it is also very cool to see her revisit her own story years later, and getting to know what happened afterwards
it is also very cool to see her revisit her own story years later, and getting to know what happened afterwards