Book Review: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Why be happy when you could be normal? Emphasis on the ‘happy’? A second glance – a ‘wait, what’ moment – reading the title alone had the cogs in my brain churning before I opened this beautiful memoir of Jeanette Winterson’s childhood. The questions and hypotheses that immediately formed in my head upon reading the cover were satisfactorily resolved within, in Winterson’s easy cadence. Marching the reader along, Winterson takes you through a gallery of her childhood with an adoptive mother who was a “flamboyant depressive” and then through her journey, as an adult, to find her biological mother – all while trying for objectivity but with clear subjective elements.

The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection. Read on its own that is an absurd sentence. But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – I come back to something to do with saying yes to life, which is love of life, however inadequate, and love for the self, however found.

From one sentence to the next, she zooms in on moments of abuse and tragedy in her childhood and then zooms out to all of humanity, using elements of reflection, history/politics, and literature that show one woman’s struggle and intelligence that ultimately culminated in her choosing a life for herself that was greater than her circumstances would have deemed capable. She manages to weave in bits of personal history with inner thoughts and universal truth seamlessly throughout the story, while still holding on to how absurd and unfair life can be. Unfairness aside, she looks for places in her life where she readied herself for something more, and said ‘yes to life’ after certain tragic moments.

Her “mother, Mrs Winterson” (she oscillates between the two, the familial endearment and the formal noun), “longed for [her] to be free and did everything she could to make sure it never happened.” Her childhood was fraught with dramatic encounters with her mother, a religious woman who believed the apocalypse was imminent and would plaster the house in exhortations from the bible. From burning her secret (secular) book collection to surprising her with an exorcism announced during church service, Mrs. Winterson does seem to lose her title of ‘mother’ many times. After the attempted exorcism, Winterson (Jeanette) decides that she “would do whatever they wanted but only on the outside” and that she would build another self on the inside – a ‘yes to life’ moment.

Winterson shows strength in adversity from beginning to end. But she also returns to her vast knowledge of literature and poetry, history and politics over and over to lend herself, and the reader, a hand in understanding her story as it relates to others.  She says that “interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing.” She bridges the gap between her personal narrative and other legends, myths, and philosophy that is easily relatable – making her memoir striking, rather than tragic, for its wisdom.