230 pages, Vantage Press
Review by Marc Nash
I'm
not sure how this, Jeanette Winterson's autobiography, compares with her
fictional debut novel "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" which treated
the same autobiographical material, since I haven't read the latter. But Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
is a searingly brutal and yet lyrical self-portrait. In case you don't know her
story, she was adopted at 6 weeks by strict Born-Again Christians in 1950s
Northern working class Britain. Her temperament was naturally at odds with
those of her domineering mother, irrespective of all the madness her mother
lumped on top through her warped world view and before they clashed
catastrophically when Winterson came out as a lesbian.
Winterson
the child retreats into reading, often smuggling books home because they were
frowned on, or casting her imagination to keep herself company when locked in a
coal-hole or made to sit outside on the doorstep in the pouring rain for some
domestic infraction. Yet the book is not a mere 'woe is me' and 'wasn't my
upbringing terrible?' hatchet job on her mother (and the father who always
shied away from challenging his wife's decisions and judgments on their
daughter). She also recalls the strengths of her upbringing, the positive out
of the negative, the invention of herself in opposition. The latter part of the
book, about her search for her birth mother, while heartrending, is given far
less page space than those who did actually rear her. And while temperamentally
she can see she is far closer to her birth family once she rediscovers them,
she doubts she would swap the environment of her childhood for what they might
have offered. She speculates she may not have been forced to self-educate and
discover the written word if she had grown up in a warmer family hearth.
Winterson
is an arch stylist. Her language is not flashy, but it is luminous. It bleeds
emotion on every page, but not messy emotion as untreated sewage; it is emotion
beautifully couched in language and metaphor so that rather than bludgeoning
us, it is more the honed blade of a stiletto knife. "But my (birth) mother
had lost me and I had lost her and our other life was like a shell on the beach
that holds an echo of the sea". Achingly beautiful prose that also rages
with its fulminating passion. Winterson does not shirk the details of her demons
and her mental breakdown which was the catalyst for searching for her birth
mother. She admits she is impossible to live with in a shared space and hard to
sustain a relationship that doesn't go up in a shower of flame. But she is also
resolute in probing behind what lies behind those tendencies. She partly
attributes it to being an outsider within her family, but her representation is
more subtly and finely wrought than that mere pop psychology might suggest. As
she says, "I recognise that life has an inside as well as an outside and
that events separated by years lie side by side imaginatively and
emotionally".
And the derivation of the title? Well that was what Mrs Winterson
retorted to Jeanette when she probed her about her lesbian relationship with a
schoolfriend and her daughter had offered that such a relationship made her
happy... We inherit our parents' genes, or not as in this case of adoption, but
there's no escaping their nurturing skills either. Such as they are... Still,
Jeanette Winterson hasn't turned out too badly has she?
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