I love Jeanette Winterson and that’s pretty much all I knew when I grabbed Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? From the library shelf. It was obviously non-fiction, with a picture of a child who had to be a young Winterson – so I figured it was a memoir. Or maybe not a memoir but something about coming out . Whatever. It didn’t matter. Winterson wrote it, I was going to read it.
And I did. Not quite straight through, because I started it very late one night, but pretty darn close.
Winterson writes in true Winterson fashion about her adoption and early childhood with Mrs (and Mr) Winterson – it wasn’t pretty, to say the least. Mrs Winterson had some big, big problems and Mr Winterson had a few of his own, (war related, poverty related, his own childhood related, and of course – Mrs Winterson related.) Then, she jumps ahead 25 years – to her nervous breakdown and the realization that she needed to look for her birth mother.
At that point, I was left wishing I knew a little bit more than I did about the missing 25 years.
Let me spoil it for you… Winterson finds her mom, an aunt, a half brother, more family members. They don’t mind her queerness, they want her to be part of their family but… it’s hard. Of course. Adoption is hard. Finding your birth family is hard. Figuring out what happens next is very hard. And when you throw in the childhood, the rough 25 years, the celebrity, the breakdown, the very thing that is Jeanette Winterson… it’s all going to be hard.
I’m fascinated by the Amazon reviews/comments. The people who thought it would be a self-help book. The people who find Winterson unlikeable. The people who find her treatment of her birth family untenable. The people who don’t recognize Winterson’s mentions and quotes from her novels as important to this story, to understanding what led her to be the person she was. Fascinating. This is a book for those who are thoughtful – It’s not self-help and Winterson doesn’t want you to like her. She tells you that here. She’s been telling you that in every novel she’s ever written. She doesn’t want you to like her because… she does not deserve it. Mrs Winterson (and the circumstances of her adoption) taught her to believe that…