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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Audiobook6 hours

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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About this audiobook

Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most acclaimed books of the last three decades, including her internationally bestselling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents that is considered one of the most important books in contemporary fiction.

Jeanette’s adoptive mother loomed over her life until Jeanette finally moved out at sixteen because she was in love with a woman. As Jeanette left behind the strict confines of her youth, her mother asked, “Why be happy when you could be normal?”

This memoir is the chronicle of a life’s work to find happiness. It is an audiobook 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 drawer; about growing up in a north England industrial town in the 1960s and 1970s; and about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also an audiobook about literature, one that shows how fiction and poetry can guide us when we are lost.

Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging—for love, identity, and a home.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMar 6, 2012
ISBN9781469201962
Author

Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959. She read English at Oxford University before writing her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, which was published in 1985.

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Why be Happy When You Could be Normal by Jeanette Winterson - Very Good

    I read Oranges are not the only fruit last year and loved it. I'd seen the tv series back in the day but hadn't realised, until reading the book, that it was semi autobiographical. This one actually is her autobiography, so it covers some of the same story, without the 'embroidery', and then takes us beyond when she left home.

    We are a similar age and were brought up in similar Lancashire Mill Towns, so some of her childhood is very, very familiar. Most of it is NOT! What a start in life! If you are not aware of her and haven't read Oranges... She was adopted and brought up by a religious fanatic who threw her out of the house at age 16 when she discovered she was a lesbian.

    That is pretty much where Oranges... stops. This book takes us onwards to Oxford, her post-university life, her relationships, her search for her natural mother etc.

    She has a wonderful use of language and the book, whilst difficult to read of the hardships of her life, was a joy to read in other respects.

    1 person found this helpful

  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I have a new favorite lesbian writer.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Reminded me of Angela's Ashes. Great writing about a tough childhood
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Fantastic story telling. Raw revealing of introspection coupled with LOL moments!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Craftily written memoir account of adoption and discovery of birth parents by writer who found an entire world in her fascination with words
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wonderful!
    I love her honesty. Aside from her narrative on finding oneself, one's home, and one's mother, I really appreciated her views on religion, working class life, literacy amongst the working class. All very fascinating. Her journey though, is amazing, one of acceptance of self, survival, and love. Despite all her hardships she hangs on. Brilliant chapter on Madness and working through it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good book. Well written, brutally honest, funny (in places). And that mother!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Writers like Jeanette Winterson understand that reading, or poetry, is more than just something to do. It's a coping mechanism, an escape, a way to distract yourself from the unpleasantries of daily life. In Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? Winterson explores her difficult childhood.Winterson was adopted by a mother who banned most books, saying, "you never know what's in [them] until it's too late," and who, learning of Winterson's sexual orientation, asked, "Why be happy when you can be normal?"The memoir touches on the difficulty of living in a family where even your deepest sense of self is rejected. Her adoptive mother, cutting and often sadistic, caused Winterson to be isolated. When she falls in love with a local girl, she becomes even colder to her adoptive daughter and the relationship between them is further strained.For those adults actively seeking their birth families, organizations like the American Adoption Congress offer support and advocate on their behalf. Unfortunately for Winterson, that resource was not available to her. Years after the death of her adoptive mother, Winterson goes on a quest to find her birth mother. Although her childhood was documented in a previous memoir, OrangesAre Not the Only Fruit, this is the first memoir to explore Winterson’s decision to find her birth mother, the long and stressful process of actually doing so, and their eventual meeting.The memoir, while well-written and emotional, fell flat for me. Most likely, it was because I can’t identify with the adoptive process. There were moments when I was truly touched, or empathized with her feelings of isolation, but overall I felt like I was always an arms-length away from truly understanding. But that is my failing, and not Winterson’s.The verdict: worth the read, but not a favorite.(less) [edit]
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I love this book. Having recently read The Book of Frank by C.A. Conrad, I am thinking this is the women's side of that story, and I liked them equally for different reasons.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I'm not sure one can say they liked a book like this, where someone strips themselves bare and calls themselves mad and lays out all their insecurities for people to see -- and you know that they knew they were doing it for people to see, and there's a whole element of theatricality about it. Nobody is a reliable narrator for their own lives -- even when they think they are -- so there's that, too.

    Jeanette Winterson's autobiography is interesting, perhaps especially to people who've read her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. It provides the truth behind that story -- as far as anything can, bearing in mind the nature of memory -- and of Jeanette's search for her original mother. Despite the title, it isn't particularly a book about being happy as opposed to normal, but one about the search for happiness rather than normality, which is not the same thing. It doesn't sound as if Jeanette Winterson has ever been happy for long, and she does not expect to be.

    The writing isn't as fanciful and passionate and sensual as it is in many of Winterson's other books: it's much more down to earth, as she describes a life defined by readings from the Bible, and a discovery of books starting from A and working through to Z. It is linear, too, without the confusing nature of some of her fiction, but all the same she skips a big section of her life, picking and choosing what to put down. It isn't boring, though it isn't about things happening so much as about what those things happening does to the person they happen to on the inside.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Both the book and Winterson's "performance" of reading it are brilliant. I felt as if she were sitting next to me in the car telling me her story. It's the story of her growing up and then more recent years...skipping some time in the middle of her life. If you've read Oranges you'll enjoyed this very much, but even if you've never read a word of Winterson's writing this is an excellent memoir about mothers--adopted, biological, chosen--and daughters, about learning how to live in the world, about claiming your life. But it's not just about mothers and daughters so don't be put off. And its certainly not about mothers and daughters in any sappy kind of way, but in the raw grittiness of how things are or can be. It's about Winterson's life, her desire to write, her reading, English literature, industrial northern England, going mad, finding love, etc. The only draw-back to listening to this rather than reading it is that I couldn't underline the poignant moments, the bits of philosophy or beautiful sentences that I'd like to go back to and appreciate. I plan on reading the book in the future so I can do just that.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    How can a memoir be so intensely heartbreaking and uplifting at the same time? And also poignantly funny and full of extraordinary language? Too much in this book resonates with me – I could read it over and over again. A little more breathtakingly honest than Oranges are not the only Fruit, if you can imagine that, it’s more to the story of adoption, abandonment and embracing of self as only she can tell it.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Some people have such a miserable childhood and still manage to survive with a sense of humour. The title of the book is revealed about midway. I enjoy this book and yet it wasn't a happy book. It wasn't a sad book though either. In spite of everything, Jeanette Winterson has come out the other side and - done well for herself. Here is a very honest, a very reflective look back on life and I'm glad I've read it!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    As a memoir of her childhood and an autobiographical approach to parts of her life Jeanette Winterson tackled in her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, this begins as a great rumination on how revisiting our past in later life can be illuminating. This part of the book culminates with her leaving home at the age of sixteen, severing ties with her adopted parents, and clawing her way into Oxford, and it is already a satisfying read. But then Winterson addresses the point in her later life when the part of her ("the creature") traumatized by being abandoned by her birth mother begins to interfere with her present day. And at that point this book really becomes terrific. Winterson's bravery, wit, and above all her determination to use literature and language as the tools of her own salvation are inspirational.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    In dem bekannten Buch "Orangen sind nicht die einzige Frucht" hat die Autorin schon einmal ihr seltsames, ja traumatisierendes Aufwachsen als Adoptivkind in einer Pfingstgemeinde dargestellt.Davon handelt auch dieses Buch, doch es thematisiert stark das Verhältnis zur Mutter. Einerseits geht es um die Adoptivmutter, die sehr distanziert als "Mrs. Winterson" bezeichnet wird und mit der es zu keiner Versöhnung kommt. Andererseits behandelt die Autorin auch die leibliche Mutter, die sie nach langem Hin und Her kennenlernt.Es ist entsetzlich, wie wenig Liebe Jeanette in ihrer Kindheit erfahren hat. Dass der Vater deutlich positiver wegkommt, finde ich erstaunlich. Ihm kann sie verzeihen und mit ihm hat sie als Erwachsene noch Kontakt, um ihn trauert sie, als er stirbt. Dabei hat doch auch er das Kind nicht aus dem Kohlenkeller geholt.Insgesamt zeigt das Buch, wie machtvoll und hilfreich die Literatur in Jeanettes Leben war. Und es gab schon auch Menschen, die dem Mädchen immer wieder geholfen haben. Letztendlich - und das ist auch Jeanettes Quintessenz- sind wir die Summe unserer Teile. Auch unsre Wunden machen uns aus. Einfach ohne Forderung und ohne Auflagen geliebt zu werden, das wünscht sich jede und jeder, das wünscht sich auch Jeanette. Dass ihre leibliche Mutter sie wollte, ist eine große Erkenntnis auf dem Weg zur Heilung. dass sie sie dennoch weggab, der Beginn ihres Traumas. Aber auch die Ermöglichung von Bildung. Und so schließt sich der Kreis.Das Buch ist ehrlich und radikal. Es ist aber auch sehr autobiografisch, kein Roman.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Nobody should be so miserable.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Such an interesting, funny-yet-harrowing read. Winterson's childhood was so sad and damaged, it's amazing that she was ever able to write anything. Or does a person need to have a traumatic past in order to become a fabulous writer?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A moving and raw story of abuse, relationships, and the lingering legacy of the past. Wonderful writing.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I really loved Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical novel "Oranges aren't the Only Fruit" so reading her memoir "Why be Happy When You Could Be Normal" seemed like a natural progression. It is difficult to read about Winterson's struggles, but the memoir is well written and interesting.If you've read "Oranges," you know Winterson's story. She was adopted at six weeks old by a couple who were Pentacostal evangelists. Her mother, referred to in this book as "Mrs. Winterson" was domineering, fanatical, emotionally abusive and completely unable to accept the fact her daughter was gay. (The title of the book is something that Mrs. Winterson actually said to her daughter.) As a result of her upbringing, Jeanette Winterson has an inability to connect with people and accept love -- or at least that's something she struggles with even in the end of the memoir. Glad I decided to pick this one up.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is such a stellar book that a review is difficult. Suffice it to say it is one wherein I want to tell my book loving friends to read it--just go ahead and read it! Those of us who are avid readers know good writing when we read, and feel it!The author was adopted. Sadly, she was taken into a small England town by a flat-out-crazy woman and her never discuss a problem husband.While Jeanette was physically and emotionally beaten down, her father simply followed what his wife wanted her to do. If she "needed" to be beaten, then he did it.Throughout the book, the author never calls the woman mother. She is known as "Mrs."Left alone on the outside stoop for hours and hours, or locked in a bin, she learned to get tough. It is with words that her internal beauty came through.Always drawn to books, when she worked, she bought them. When the Mrs. found them, they were promptly burnt.At the age of sixteen, when Jeanette discovered love via another woman's arms, in church her mother announced that an exorcism was needed. No where better was the hypocrisy of her mother's religion shown than when one of the men performing the exorcism was visibly aroused and tried to accost Jeanette. This incredibly well-written book is about many things. It is about the search for love and the difficulty of trust. It is about the search for identity of a biological mother. It is about reading and the redemption of beautifully crafted words. It is about the meaning of home. And, I urge you to read it--just go ahead and read it.Five stars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This book is a new addition to my most favorite books ever! I must have used about a half a tin of those little copper page markers, there were just so many poignant events and wonderful insights throughout this book. This is the story of Jeanette, whose adoptive mother was difficult and unloving, to say the least. Abusive comes to mind. And yet, Jeanette rises above it, buffered by a few key individuals and by her boundless love of books. Lest this scare any readers away, I did not find this to be a sad book. There are sad moments, but it is also, reflective, very funny, and so wise. The stories are unforgettable and I cannot wait to read more by this amazing author. First, a taste of her sad childhood: "When she knew I was keeping a diary she said, 'I never kept secrets from my mother...but I am not your mother, am I?' And after that she never was. When I wanted to learn to play her piano she said, ' When you come back from school I will have sold it.' She had." On a lighter note, here is one of Winterson's literary insights from Jack and the Beanstalk. "The bridge (the Beanstalk) between the two worlds is unpredictable and very surprising. And later, when the giant tries to climb after Jack, the beanstalk has to be chopped down pronto. This suggests to me that the pursuit of happiness, which we may as well call life, is full of surprising temporary elements -- we get somewhere we couldn't go otherwise and we profit from the trip, but we can't stay there, it isn't our world, and we shouldn't let that world come crashing down into the one we inhabit. The beanstalk has to be chopped down. But the large-scale riches from the 'other world' can be brought into ours, just as Jack makes off with the singing harp and the golden hen. Whatever we 'win' will accommodate itself to our size and form..."And as to how Winterson writes, in a nonlinear form (which I loved!): Her mother discovered Jeanette's hidden trove of books and immediately suspected the worst: Satanism and pornography. She took all her books and threw them out the window into the backyard. Then she set them on fire while Jeanette watched."I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. And books have always been light and warmth to me."I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone."In the morning there were stray bits of text all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps."It is probably why I write as I do -- collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? 'These fragments have I shored against my ruin...'"From these ashes, a wonderful story and a great writer, one who appreciates how her bitter youth made her the woman she is today. Highly recommended. 5 stars.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Based on the title of this book, and not liking to know much about a book before I read it, I thought it was going to be humorous. And it was, in places, but it was not about humor. It was about an adopted child's very difficult life, and her ability to come to terms with it.I came to know this author not through her immensely popular Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, and I haven't seem any of the TV version. Instead, I read Ms. Winterson's retelling of Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. Her The Gap of Time was extraordinary for me. And now that I know something of the author's life, it is even more meaningful.In Why be Happy... the author writes of her dour adoptive mother who told her, “The Devil lead us to the wrong crib.” “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.”She was a woman who was just enduring life while she waited to die. A woman who locked her daughter outside all night, or in the coal bin. And not surprisingly, the author usually referred to her mother as “Mrs Winterson.”I think writing this book must have been cathartic for the author, and it is sad. And funny. And insightful. And I want to hug the little girl that Jeanette was, and tell her that yes, she was loved. But, sadly, not by the woman who should have loved her most. And Ms, Winterson persevered, and we, her readers, are grateful for that.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Why be happy when you could be normal? by Jeanette WintersonAccrington, England and the story begins just before she is adopted by the Winterson. The story follows the life of the girl and the struggles throughout the years.When she turns 16 she leaves, she is a lesbian and the family is very religious. Each have their own routines and it's quite plain and boring. No car so they walk everywhere, usually miles per day.Lots of quoting from the Bible and from literary works. Troubled times as she doesn't fit in and manages to find her mother and they do meet. Lots of questions and lots of answers to those.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jeanette Winterson was a giant in my young life. I think I hopped off the train at Lighthousekeeping, which I may revisit, but which didn't seem to have the force of Oranges or Sexing the Cherry. Her work hasn't had an active presence in my mind for a few years, acting more like part of the foundation or a constellation in my firmament. I chanced upon her reading from her memoir at AWP. She was supposed to read with Allison Bechdel, who canceled, so she just expanded. It was great. What a book to happen upon when you're in a rut and your leisure reading feels like homework and you want need something to take you back to reading as play, as salvation. By turns it is an: adoption narrative, biography of her mother, coming of age story, snapshot of industrial North England through the lens of a working class evangelical family. It would have been easy for Winterson to frame her mother as a monster or to expose evangelical christianity as total bunk, but she doesn't. As she discusses towards the end of the book, her approach is to resist easy dualisms. Plus it's impossible to imagine her writing herself into the role of victim. Wounded, emotional, shaped by her circumstances but not a victim. The end felt messy, I think, for the same reasons that it was such an engaging read - I was happy with the genre bending, but then I wanted it neatly tied up. Ultimately, I'm glad Winterson didn't give in and write the payoff ending that readers are so conditioned to want.

    The parts about books and reading really got to me. She visited her local library and set herself the goal of reading through the section labelled "English Literature: A-Z". How encountering Nabokov made her a feminist. Stacking books under her mattress only to have her mother burn them. I die! Being part of a literary community sometimes has the paradoxical effect of obscuring the simple and profound truth that reading and writing have the power to save you. There, inner snarker - I said it! This is the truth I live by.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Jeanette Winterson is the author of several novels, including Oranges are not the Only Fruit, which brought her recognition and fame, especially in the UK. Oranges was semi-autobiographical; this memoir is the real story of her unconventional upbringing. The adopted daughter of a domineering, sexually repressed, fanatically religious mother, Jeanette was subject to emotional and physical abuse until she left home at sixteen. Through a near miracle she earned a place at Oxford and was able to realize her dream of becoming a writer. But while she appeared outwardly successful, the scars of abuse had not even begun to heal. Convinced she had never been loved and was unable to love others, she became estranged from her parents and found it difficult to be in relationship with others.Jeanette’s journey through these trials is fascinating and turbulent. It took me a while to become emotionally invested in her story, but I got there, and when she began searching for her birth mother, I admired her tenacity and was reminded of a quote early in the book:I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.I admire Jeanette Winterson for never doing “the sensible thing.”
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    'Why be happy when you can be normal?' asks Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother (tellingly always referred to as Mrs Winterson, rather than anything more affectionate) on the day when, aged 16 and still at school, Jeanette is thrown out of the family home. But Mrs Winterson is anything but normal: the extreme nature of Mrs Winterson's Pentecostal Christian beliefs (church everyday and all day on Sundays) would prevent this in the small Northern town of Accrington where she was brought up. Religious texts abound: Mrs Winterson puts quotes from scripture into Jeanette's hockey boots, and all over the house. 'Linger not at the Lord's business' and 'He shall melt thy bowels like wax' are the ones chosen for the outside toilet. And Mrs Winterson's feeling of superiority to her neighbours combined with her religious sensibilities resulted in some odd choices:'Back in the days of Winterson-world we had a set of Victorian watercolours hung on the walls. Mrs W. had inherited them from her mother and she wanted to display them in a family way. But she was dead against 'graven images' (See Exidus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy, etc) so she squares this circle by hanging them back to front. All we could see was brown paper, tape, steel tacks, water staining and string. That was a Mrs Winterson version of life.'But Mrs Winterson is clearly also a deeply disturbed woman who is disappointed both in life and in her adopted daughter. Jeanette's childhood is the sort that today would get social services involved very quickly, in fact it is surprising that it did not so so even in the 1960s and 70s. Being locked out of the house all night, being locked into the coal cellar, and regular beatings formed part of her normal experience, culminating in an exorcism in her teenage years to drive out the demons that were supposedly attracting her to other girls. Books were Jeanette's refuge, but books were also for forbidden, and her growing book collection (hidden under her mattress from prying eyes) goes up in smoke when discovered by her mother.This is a more factual retelling of the fictionalised events of Winterson's first novel Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. I've read Oranges are not the Only Fruit twice and seen the award winning BBC production maybe twice as well, so I'm very familiar with that the fictional version. How someone who had not read the earlier book would approach this one I'm not sure, as it is frequently referred to and points of difference pointed out. One of these differences is 'Testifying Elsie', an old woman who acts as a bulwark against the wrath of Jeanette's mother in the earlier book. A character who was written in because she couldn't bear to leave her out. But in real life 'There was no Elsie. there was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that'This isn't a conventional memoir, vast swathes of Jeanette's adult life are missed out, but as she focuses on her relationship with her adoptive mother, and her attempts to find her real mother it's a format that seems to work. Clearly damaged to by her upbringing, this is an honest attempt by Jeanette Winterson to recognise who and what has made her who she is today, and to come to terms with the good as well as the bad. Recommended, especially for those who have enjoyed Oranges are not the Only Fruit.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A great memoir (of sorts) dealing with the idea of feeling displaced, the healing power of creativity, and figuring out the beneficial aspects of love, as well as learning to love in a new way.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    This is a book about the damage that parents (both real and adoptive) can inflict on children, and how that damage is carried through in adult life. It is full of insight, sadness, wit and surprises. It is also profoundly moving, particularly towards the end. Winterson manages again the difficult trick of making her very specific situation reach out to the universal. There are many clever ways in which form matches content here and the structure is well thought out. It is a book to be read aloud and with care.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Read this for book club. So many things to think about, but such a sad life as a child.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Unnerving, but gently humorous, this book left me with plenty of thoughts. I have not read any of her other works (how?), but I now intend to remedy this soon. I enjoyed the discussion around complexity of the adoption narrative.