Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal_ - Jeanette Winterson [0]
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Jeanette Winterson
Dedication
Title Page
1. The Wrong Crib
2. My Advice to Anybody Is: Get Born
3. In The Beginning Was The Word
4. The Trouble With A Book …
5. At Home
6. Church
7. Accrington
8. The Apocalypse
9. English Literature A–Z
10. This Is The Road
11. Art and Lies
Intermission
12. The Night Sea Voyage
13. This Appointment Takes Place In The Past
14. Strange Meeting
15. The Wound
Coda
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster.
Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five, her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award, become an international bestseller and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation.
Oranges was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over that novel and its author’s life. When Jeanette finally left her home, at sixteen, because she was in love with a woman, Mrs Winterson asked her: why be happy when you could be normal?
This book is the story 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 tyrant in place of a mother, who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition, part of a community now vanished; about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life, and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people’s stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking.
Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.
About the Author
Jeanette Winterson OBE is the author of ten novels, including The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Written on the Body, a book of short stories, The World and Other Places, a collection of essays, Art Objects as well as many other works, including children’s books, screenplays and journalism. Her writing has won the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the E. M. Forster Award and the Prix d'argent at Cannes Film Festival.
Visit her website at www.jeanettewinterson.com
ALSO BY JEANETTE WINTERSON
Fiction
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit
The Passion
Sexing the Cherry
Written on the Body
Art & Lies
Gut Symmetries
The World and Other Places
The Powerbook
Lighthousekeeping
Weight
The Stone Gods
Non-Fiction
Art Objects
Comic Book
Boating for Beginners
Children’s Books
Tanglewreck
The King of Capri
The Battle of the Sun
The Lion, the Unicorn and Me
Screenplays
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (BBC TV)
Ingenious (BBC TV)
To my three mothers:
Constance Winterson
Ruth Rendell
Ann S.
Jeanette Winterson
Why Be Happy
When You Could
Be Normal?
1
The Wrong Crib
WHEN MY MOTHER was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’
The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it. She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. A woman with a prolapse, a thyroid condition, an enlarged heart, an ulcerated leg that never healed, and two sets of false teeth – matt