Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
(Adobe EPUB eBook, Kindle Book, OverDrive Read)
One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years”
Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). 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, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author 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 the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking.
Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.
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Jeanette Winterson. (2012). Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Author Date Citation (style guide)Jeanette Winterson. 2012. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Atlantic.
Chicago / Turabian - Humanities Citation (style guide)Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Atlantic, 2012.
MLA Citation (style guide)Jeanette Winterson. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Grove Atlantic, 2012.
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- bioText: Born in Manchester, England, Jeanette Winterson is the author of seventeen books, including the national bestseller Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and The Passion. She has won many prizes including the Whitbread Award for Best First Novel, the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, the E. M. Forster Award, and the Stonewall Award.
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- A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue).
One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years”
Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). 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, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author 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 the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking.
Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother. - reviews
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Starred review from October 24, 2011
“What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?” Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) asks of her relationship with her adoptive mother, questions that haunt this raw memoir to its final pages. Winterson first finds solace in the Accrington Public Library in Lancashire, where she stumbles across T.S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral and begins to cry: “the unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day.” She is asked to leave the library for crying and sits on the steps in “the usual northern gale” to finish the book. The rest is history. Highly improbably for a woman of her class, she gets into Oxford and goes on to have a very successful literary career. But she finds that literature—and literary success—can only fulfill so much in her. There’s another ingredient missing: love. The latter part of the book concerns itself with this quest, in which Winterson learns that the problem is not so much being gay (for which her mother tells her “you’ll be in Hell”) as it is in the complex nature of how to love anyone when one has only known perverse love as a child. This is a highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and endearing memoir.
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December 1, 2011
Acclaimed novelist Winterson (The Battle of the Sun, 2010, etc.) revisits her difficult childhood as an adoptee, chronicling the search for her biological mother. The author ponders her youth and examines how those challenging years changed and shaped her as an adult. Frequently locked out on the doorstep by her abusive, Pentecostal, adoptive mother or often told she was "a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature," Winterson wondered if she had ever been wanted, by her biological or adoptive mother. The author struggled with the ebb and flow of Mrs. Winterson's love, finding escape from her mood swings in the local public library, where she devoured a wide variety of literature. When her secret stash of books was discovered and burned, Winterson rebelled by claiming she would write her own books one day. At age 16, she was kicked out of the house and forced to live in her car. Books and words brought comfort and led Winterson to Oxford and writing, but she descended into a deep depression when her lover left her. The search for her true identity and her birth mother helped bring her back from the darkness. Rich in detail and the history of the northern English town of Accrington, Winterson's narrative allows readers to ponder, along with the author, the importance of feeling wanted and loved. A moving, honest look at life as an abused adopted child.(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)
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October 1, 2011
Raised by adoptive parents in a grimy north England industrial town, Winterson endured a religious fanatic of a mother with two sets of dentures and a tendency to lock her daughter out of the house at night. When her past caught up with the author, literature saved her--a lesson worth repeating. For anyone who loves Winterson's scalding fiction and memoir generally; with an eight-city tour.
Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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Starred review from February 1, 2012
Winterson's volatile and eccentrically devout adoptive mother was apocalyptic by nature. In self-defense, as we learn in this galvanizing memoir and testimony to the healing properties of creativity, Winterson took shelter in the library, discovering in poetry and fiction language powerful enough to say how it is. After she acquired some books of her own, only to have her ogre of a mother burn them, Winterson summoned her resolve: Fuck it, ' I thought, I can write my own.' She was similarly stoic when her mother caught her in bed with another girl and arranged for an exorcism that turned sexually abusive. Winterson fled her bleak Lancashire home at 16, got herself to Oxford, and wrote her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which became a beacon in gay culture. Drawing on her cartwheel imagination and piercing worldview, Winterson wrote a dozen more books (Sexing the Cherry, 1990; The Stone Gods, 2008) to resounding acclaim. But her long-submerged anguish finally boiled up, leading to a breakdown, an unnerving search for her birth mother, and an all-out struggle to understand what it is to love and be loved. Clarion, courageous, and vividly expressive, Winterson conducts a dramatic and revelatory inquiry into the forging of the self and the liberating power of literature.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)
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March 1, 2014
An acclaimed British novelist, Winterson deftly writes of a rough childhood with her adoptive fundamentalist parents in a dark, industrial town. It's England, the 1960s, and the air is full of social change but not in her family. This is a bold, raw coming-of-age story of a girl who escapes and learns to accept herself and become a successful author. (LJ 11/1/11)
Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years”
Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). 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... - sortTitle
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