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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

3.88 of 5 stars 3.88 · rating details · 9,333 ratings · 1,125 reviews

Heartbreaking and funny: the true story behind Jeanette's bestselling and most beloved novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

In 1985, at twenty-five, Jeanette published Oranges, the story of a girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, supposed to grow up to be a missionary. Instead, she falls in love with a woman. Disaster.

Oranges became an international bestseller, inspired an...more

Hardcover, 230 pages

Published March 6th 2012 by Knopf Canada (first published October 25th 2011)

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Nov 19, 2011 Moira Russell rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2011-50-new-books-challenge

This book came in the mail today, I opened the package, opened the book and looked at a few pages randomly, started reading, and about half an hour later turned back to the beginning so I could start reading it properly. That's as good a star ranking as anything, I think.

This book isn't really a memoir, (but then again, if you expect linear storytelling from Jeanette Winterson....): it skips twenty-five years of her life in an "Intermission" and the end is so open-ended a great breeze might com...more

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Jan 19, 2013 Petra X rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-true-story

If you read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit then this just reads like an early version before the editor said to the author, "You can't write that, no one will believe you." The cliché goes that truth is stranger than fiction and this book is definitely stranger than Oranges. It is hard, for instance, to believe that the author, as an adult, never addressed her mother as anything but Mrs. Winterson.

Small personal anecdote that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book other than it's a bit about...more If you read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit then this just reads like an early version before the editor said to the author, "You can't write that, no one will believe you." The cliché goes that truth is stranger than fiction and this book is definitely stranger than Oranges. It is hard, for instance, to believe that the author, as an adult, never addressed her mother as anything but Mrs. Winterson.

Small personal anecdote that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book other than it's a bit about Winterson's famous girlfriend who was much celebrated and made a lot of money from her book on fat and feminism, but there you go, when did my reviews ever stick to the point?

Years ago, having quite a lot of money and not much sense of what to spend it on I decided physical perfection was all and took myself off to a health farm, or 'spa', in Malta to lose some weight and tone up. It was a sleazy dump with hardly any facilities and was in fact a money-laundering operation for a body-building company in the UK that mostly sold steroids. There weren't many clients and all of us were there to lose weight which bewildered the few staff who didn't seem to know what to do with us other than to feed us very little and tell us to swim in the algae-green pool. In other words, a perfect place to hide out. The author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue was there, the girlfriend of Jeanette Winterson. Not such a feminist issue, eh?

Can you trust any author to be who they say they are or is it all just for effect? I guess so long as the money keeps rolling in its all 'true', and when the money stops - maybe that's time for a tell-all autobiography with tv interviews revealing all the psychological problems that stopped the author from telling the truth in the first place. I'm thinking now of Orbach, but it applies to any author, maybe even Winterson. (If a tell-all doesn't bring the cash in and the fame back, then there's always reality tv).

Edited because I was apparently very insulting with two words, so I took them out. What a laugh to complain about that though!(less)

58 likes · like · see review

Oct 24, 2012 jo rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: mama-is-crazy, memoir, psychic-pain, queer, great-britain

this book is a broken elegy to the north of england and a world of small shops, small communities, and simple habits that no longer exists. it's also a tribute to a hardy working class people who knows resilience, pluckiness, no-nonsensicality, and making a life out of what you are given. surprisingly, it's a vindication of the values of faith, which keep people under the direst circumstances out of the clutches of despair and of the feeling of being trapped. these are winterson's words. this tr...more

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Jan 22, 2013 Cecily rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biog-and-autobiog

This is the truer, grittier, more analytical version of "Oranges are Not the Only Fruit" (http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...), with an update of Winterson's very recent attempts to trace her birth mother, and interspersed with thoughts on words, writing, literature and a dash of politics of family, class, feminism and sexuality. It is better if you are familiar with Oranges, but not essentail.

NOT "MISERY LIT"
When I read Oranges many years ago, it was before the vogue for "misery lit", a ge...more

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Nov 26, 2012 oriana rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-2012

I finished this book on a frigid Sunday afternoon, lying lazily on my too-deep couch, covered in a ridiculously soft blanket, with my boyfriend cackling in the other room while watching "news fails" on YouTube and my little dog curled up by my side, lending me his warmth.

I have had such an easy life, it is sometimes difficult to fathom.

Jeanette Winterson has not had an easy life. Or anyway she had an almost impossibly surreal / awful childhood (adopted by a frighteningly inconsistent and extrem...more I finished this book on a frigid Sunday afternoon, lying lazily on my too-deep couch, covered in a ridiculously soft blanket, with my boyfriend cackling in the other room while watching "news fails" on YouTube and my little dog curled up by my side, lending me his warmth.

I have had such an easy life, it is sometimes difficult to fathom.

Jeanette Winterson has not had an easy life. Or anyway she had an almost impossibly surreal / awful childhood (adopted by a frighteningly inconsistent and extremely religious mother, who regularly locked her in the coal shed overnight), an adolescence during which she lived in her car (after mom kicked her out for being a lesbian), and a young adulthood wherein she took her impoverished, working-class self all the way to and through Oxford, despite staggering sexism, homophobia, and snobbery (they told her she was their "working-class experiment," and her best friend was their "black experiment"). She has spent her life overcoming—overcoming abandonment and adoption, overcoming a lack of love, overcoming poverty, overcoming provincialism, overcoming heteronormativity, overcoming the judgments of the entire world.

And yet this memoir, which I expected to be agonizing, is instead matter-of-fact, witty, piercing, and generally triumphant. Jeanette is not a dweller or a wallower, at least not anymore; she is frank about the difficulties she has gone through, relating even rather harrowing anecdotes with grace and compassion. Hers is a journey, always, toward understanding: trying to figure out those around her, saving herself through literature, learning how to love by piecing it together day by day.

The book is in two parts. The first, from birth (more or less) to college, has a narrative tone that is at a slight remove from the story. Jeanette is, of course, a writer, with a writer's sense of pacing, of plot arc, of what to reveal and when to reveal it, of the flourishes necessary to a tale well told. She relates most of the anecdotes from her childhood smoothly—after all, she's spent her whole career polishing and retelling them. This part of the story is moving but a bit pat; it is clever and rather self-aware, although it is certainly devastating and illuminating in turns.

But then—after a two-page "interlude" that encompasses about twenty-five years—the second half of the book is practically in the present, starting maybe five years ago, and it encompasses Jeanette's search for her birth mother. And suddenly the narrative becomes ragged, jagged, raw. This is the story Jeanette is still living, and it has not been rehearsed; it has barely even got done being lived.

She navigates the Kafkaesque bureaucracy of the British legal system with a somewhat crazed frenzy, and with the help of kind souls along the way. She opens up her brain and her body and lets us look right in, into her hysterical fears, her calcified anger, the wailing hopefulness she has spent her whole life tamping down into frustration. I can't even describe it; it's devastating, enraging, anxiety-ridden, and so so intense.

And even still, clever! Her writing style throughout is very British and dry, no-nonsense-y and simple but shot through with literary allusions, with whole quoted poems and passages. And funny, I can't stress that enough, because it was the last thing I was expecting. I'm tempted to start quoting lines, but I'd wind up transcribing pages and pages, and I haven't got the time.

But listen: this book is really brilliant. I am now going to sink right back into my too-deep couch, grab the cuddly dog, and start rereading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. And after that I'm going to Netflix the BBC movie of it, and then I'm going to comb my shelves and my friends' shelves for all her other books, which I've either never read or haven't read in years.

Jeanette, I love you. You are astonishing.(less)

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Oct 25, 2012 Kaethe rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: adventure, books-about-books, domesticity, feminism, glbtq, libraries, nonfiction, memoir, orphans, poetry, sex-positive, social-issues, uk

Winterson had a dreadful start in life. The woman who raised her was hyper religious and distinctly odd. But, the consolation of a miserable friendless childhood is books, so there is a lot about reading here. The last third focuses on the search of Winterson's birth family, and just how bloody-minded bureaucracy can be. I dearly loved reading about Winterson's steady movement through Prose, and her awakening to feminist writing. Cool stuff.

Library copy.

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Nov 19, 2011 ·Karen· rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography-memoir, brits

What a fierce child young Jeanette must have been. A small warrior, blazing with desire for life, battling the sheer bloody awfulness of her upbringing and the narrowness of her surroundings, protecting herself from further rejection by preventive strike. Spiky.

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SPOILERS!!

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The first half of this book feels raw; but this can only be the illusion created by the rough language, the short sentences, the baldness, the bleakness of her...more What a fierce child young Jeanette must have been. A small warrior, blazing with desire for life, battling the sheer bloody awfulness of her upbringing and the narrowness of her surroundings, protecting herself from further rejection by preventive strike. Spiky.

**********************************

SPOILERS!!

**********************************

The first half of this book feels raw; but this can only be the illusion created by the rough language, the short sentences, the baldness, the bleakness of her life reflected in terse, sparse prose. This brings startling, swirling effects when contrasted with the rhythms of the King James Bible or John Donne. For the story that is skirted and prodded at here is the material of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, published 26 years ago. She calls Oranges the cover version. "I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it." Here is the painful story, the one that no-one could survive. Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother, called Mrs Winterson throughout the book, was a fervent convert to the Elim Pentecostal Church who believed and declared that Satan had led her to the wrong crib, who read Jane Eyre to Jeanette, but changed the ending so that Jane married sanctimonious St John Rivers and went on missionary work with him, who burnt the books hidden under Jeanette's mattress because "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," who locked Jeanette out all night,who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, who believed Jeanette's sexuality was a demon to be exorcised.

The second half of the book IS raw. It is written in real time, as Jeanette Winterson rides out the storm of a complete breakdown, steadfastly waiting huddled below a wall outside her house in the country, looking at the view and waiting for the pain to pass. A new relationship with the writer and psychologist Susie Orbach and the search for her birth mother drags her out of despair, but equally harrowing is the Kafkaesque tale of how bureaucracy throws stumbling blocks in the path of that search. When she does find her birth mother, there is a strong sense of her having to re-calibrate her life to accommodate not only a mother but half siblings too. She ends "I have no idea what happens next."

Throughout, what shines through is survival through literature, and the complexity of feeling that allows the reader to feel sympathy for the ineffective father and even for the monstrous Mrs Winterson. There are ripples of delightful humour among the bleak:
The only time that Mrs Winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the Mormons were coming round. Then she waited in the lobby, and before they had dropped the knocker she had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation. This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job.

The title, by the way, is the real question asked by Mrs Winterson when Jeanette walked out at the age of sixteen in order to be happy with her first girlfriend, Janey. What mother does not want her child to be happy?(less)

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Jul 23, 2012 Osho rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012

A fascinating autobiography that illuminates the author's Oranges are Not the Only Fruit. Winterson knows how to turn a phrase, and though this story sometimes spends too long on philosophical abstractions and psychodynamic interpretation as it nears its end, it still holds together nicely. A good adoption narrative in its own right, and one requiring a level of detective perseverance on the author's part that is reminiscent of Homes's in The Mistress's Daughter.

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Sep 23, 2012 Ellie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2012-individual-challenge, bio-memoir, family, literary, writers, non-fiction

" We were like refugees in our own lives."
"I assumed she hid books the way she hid everything else, including her own heart..."
"Love between us was not an emotion; it was a bomb site between us."
These are just a couple of my favorite quotes from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? a memoir by one of my favorite authors, Jeanette Winterson. Her, as always, beautiful prose and poignant faith in the power of the word and story makes this painful story almost inspirational.

Winterson, adopted at...more

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Feb 18, 2013 Anittah marked it as to-read

Dear twat who not only took my seat in the waiting room at the doctor's office but also swiped that which was reserving my seat i.e. this book in hardcover:

May you read this book, appreciate that which I have already underlined and annotated, and be a wiser person for having done so. Given the actions that you have already undertaken, it appears to me that the bar measuring your current level of wiseness is rather low, so I am optimistic that you will be less of an ingrate after finishing this t...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Ali rated it 4 of 5 stars

It is a very long time since I read Oranges are not the only fruit – but it is a book that has stayed with me ever since. Recently I have seen several really good reviews of this autobiography from the author of that famous novel. That novel is famously autobiographical, but Winterson tells us in this book, that her childhood wasn’t really like that depicted in “oranges” it was in fact worse than that.
"There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that".
Jeanette...more It is a very long time since I read Oranges are not the only fruit – but it is a book that has stayed with me ever since. Recently I have seen several really good reviews of this autobiography from the author of that famous novel. That novel is famously autobiographical, but Winterson tells us in this book, that her childhood wasn’t really like that depicted in “oranges” it was in fact worse than that.
"There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that".
Jeanette Winterson was born in 1959, adopted by her strict Pentecostal parents and brought to Accrington. It was a landscape of long streets of terraced houses, a northern town often drenched in rain. Jeanette who was told when she was naughty – that the devil had taken them to the wrong crib – was at odds with her mother right from the start. Mrs Winterson – as she almost always calls her – was a harsh unyielding woman. She would sit up all night – to avoid sharing a bed with her husband, she kept a revolver in the duster drawer and two sets of false teeth (one for best). The stories of Mrs Winterson’s larger than life monstrousness come thick and fast, but I won’t relate any more of them here. If Mrs Winterson was a fictional character – she would be a masterly invention. The fact that she was real possibly makes her more monstrous. Frequently Jeanette was locked out of the house – forced to spend the night sitting on the doorstep. She discusses her idea of home and what it is to belong to somewhere.
“Our own front door can be a wonderful thing, or a sight we dread; rarely is it only a door.”
As Jeanette grows up she discovers two things – things which are forbidden – books, and that she fancies other girls.
“I was sixteen and my mother was about to throw me out of the house forever, for breaking a very big rule, even bigger than the forbidden books. The rule was not just No Sex, but definitely No Sex With Your Own Sex.”
Winterson writes with a fantastic wry humour that belies the darkness of her much of her story. It is a dark story – the story of a lonely child – who screamed until she was two – an image that haunted me as someone who works with children I found that unbelievably poignant. She is very honest about how growing up in such an atmosphere affected her and her relationships – as surely it must. It is the story of how Winterson became the woman she is today, the story of her love of books and writing, the story of her search for her birth mother, and a story that is at last ultimately uplifting.
I enjoyed Winterson’s writing style enormously; it makes for a quick accessible read, packed with funny and sad stories of Jeanette Winterson’s childhood and adolescence.(less)

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Nov 21, 2011 Jennifer D. rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: arc, books-i-own, memoir, 2011-books

By Zoe Williams, The Guardian

Jeanette Winterson's memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it's almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read, and it also feels like the most turbulent and the least controlled. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first hal...more By Zoe Williams, The Guardian

Jeanette Winterson's memoir is written sparsely and hurriedly; it is sometimes so terse it's almost in note form. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read, and it also feels like the most turbulent and the least controlled. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first half is a ruse; that, in a Lilliputian fashion, what appears to be a straight narrative of her early life is actually tying the reader down with a thousand imperceptible guy ropes, so that when she unleashes a terrible sorrow, there is no escaping it and no looking away.

"Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful). There are passages and phrases that will be recognisable to anyone who's read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit: this is not surprising, since that first, bold announcement of Winterson's talent was a roman à clef, and never claimed to be otherwise.

So anecdotes and jokes crop up in both books: the mother says the lesbian sweet-shop owners deal in "unnatural passions", and the young Jeanette thinks it means they put chemicals in their sweets; the gospel tent, the CB radio, all the memorable details of the first fictional outing come up again, but the point is not that this is repetitive. Rather, that the documents are intended as companions, to lay this one over the last like tracing paper, so that even if the author poetically denies the possibility of an absolute truth, there emerges nevertheless the shape of the things that actually happened. I had forgotten how upbeat Oranges was; it may have been peopled by eccentrics, with a heroine held in alienation by the aspic of impotent childhood, but there were upsides. "I suppose the saddest thing for me," Winterson writes now, "thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it."

The upbringing as she tells it now is far bleaker; she was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. However, the story's leavened throughout by other observations. The geopolitics I sometimes found bold, and other times found too broad to be conclusive: "In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?" But it wriggles with humour, even as Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard." There is Winterson's quirky favourite hymn ("Cheer up ye saints of God," it starts, "There is nothing to worry about"), her loving, impressionistic descriptions of classic authors, from TS Eliot to Gertrude Stein, as she first encounters them. And even with all this new, distressing detail, the story of her childhood ends well – it ends in escape.

Then there's an odd page or two entitled "Intermission", which finishes: "The womb to tomb of an interesting life – but I can't write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact … I am going to miss out 25 years … Maybe later …"

And suddenly we are on to territory which is alarming, moving, at times genuinely terrifying; skip forward a quarter century, and Winterson has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in the effects of her dad, when he's moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." At times she describes the process with precision. Other times, though, the scars of this first abandonment are given in the most unadorned, uncharacteristic prose, as though she's trying to gnaw her way through her own sophistication to get to the truth of it. In a way, the presence in the narrative of Susie Orbach, with whom Winterson started a relationship just before she started looking for her birth mother, acts as a reassurance to the reader as much as to the author, a fixed point to whom we can return, whose very inclusion means that, whatever happens, a fresh abandonment won't be the outcome. Otherwise I genuinely think it would be unbearable. At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears.

There is much here that's impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one's sympathy, for everyone involved, so that the characters who are demons at the start – her adoptive mother but also, to a degree, her acquiescent adoptive father – emerge, by the end, as simply, catastrophically damaged. In the process of uncovering that, she painstakingly unpicks the damage they wreaked on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is, in this sense, more important and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.(less)

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Jan 02, 2012 Sally Whitehead rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: books-read-in-2011

"Oranges are not the Only Fruit" is easily one of my all time favourite books. I read it as a young adult when literature was a new and exciting discovery and it was incredibly influential. As a result, despite having never read any other Jeanette Winterson, she has always interested me, and I can't help but feel an affection towards her.

"Why be Happy..." is much more than an autobiography, and it doesn't simply rewrite a more honest account of the fictionalised semi-autobiographical "Oranges"....more

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Jul 09, 2012 Blue rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: memoir, queer

"Going mad is the beginning of a process. It is not supposed to be the end result."

Winterson's bold memoir, an attempt to set the record straight with regards to the half-imagined/half-truthful Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, and a genuine effort to question origins of love and being loved, reads just like a memoir version of Winterson's fiction. There is a lot to think about here, a lot of laughs and some very interesting ideas imbued in sadness, anger, and despair. Madness, indeed, is a proces...more

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Jun 21, 2012 Matt rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library

Continuing my program of reading lesbian writers' memoirs of their mothers...

I've never read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I've read some other Winterson, attracted by her style more than her subject matter, but that one hasn't yet percolated to the top of the pile. This one, though, had the killer title. And some pretty good reviews.

I don't think it's unfair to the book to say that it spends its first half building up the character of "Mrs. Winterson," who adopted Jeanette at 6 weeks old, int...more Continuing my program of reading lesbian writers' memoirs of their mothers...

I've never read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I've read some other Winterson, attracted by her style more than her subject matter, but that one hasn't yet percolated to the top of the pile. This one, though, had the killer title. And some pretty good reviews.

I don't think it's unfair to the book to say that it spends its first half building up the character of "Mrs. Winterson," who adopted Jeanette at 6 weeks old, into someone who could believably ask her daughter the insane titular question. Another quarter goes to Jeanette's escape from home to Oxford, where she was hardly more welcome—and then Winterson skips over the 25 years of her public life as a writer to tell the story of her recent stumbling and shameful discovery of her birth mother.

In the end, this book is about exactly the same thing as Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, without all the psychoanalytic apparatus:

When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. [p. 76]

"Mrs. Winterson was not a welcoming woman" (p. 100), but she had adopted Jeanette from a mother who had seen fit to give her up. Jeanette learns as a child to reconcile this bleak environment with the name "home" and to call this cold, distant person "mother." Even now she cannot detach herself completely: "She was a monster but she was my monster" (p. 229).

Her life was home, church, school—and the library. Now:

Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. [p. 61]

Or later: "If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts" (p. 164). Growing up she could see, thanks to books, that another world was possible; when she made good her escape it wasn't to that world, but to one flawed in other ways, and so books are still necessary. If she can't find the one that takes her where she wants to go, she must write it herself.

Rambling episodes and emergent structure are trademarks of Winterson's style, and they're present in this narrative as in her fiction—but here, perhaps because the story is "fact," I got impatient with her wandering and dawdling, even though I knew they were telling me something about the present-day narrator who is, after all, the subject. We know the protagonist survives childhood and becomes a writer; what only she could give us would be the experience of that child's perspective, with no escape visible. On the other hand, if we allow that this memoir is as much about her recent self-discovery, then that should be clarified and foregrounded from the start. Maybe organizing things more cleanly and linearly (even if in two parallel lines) would destroy this book, but I found myself frustrated by the very narrative tics which attract me to Winterson's fiction.

Some more brilliant quotes which I couldn't work in to my review:
"And I wasn't looking to improve the conditions of my life. I wanted to change my life out of all recognition." (p. 133)
"I had been given life and I had done my best with what I had been given. But there was no more to do there." (p. 169)
(about reconstructing her lost childhood) "This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb." (p. 172)(less)

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Apr 05, 2012 Linda Cohen rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: 2012, memoir, arc

I remember reading 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' way back when I had my first bookstore job. I don't remember the book itself but that it was a trade paperback when they were still a new thing and only serious lit was published in that form(The Basketball Diaries was another book I read back then)and how momentous it seemed. This memoir was much the same way-I have never marked so many passages that hit me so hard and so right with their truth and beauty.

The title says it all-if life is a cho...more

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Mar 07, 2012 Joey Diamond rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: queerdo, deep-lez

My mum came to visit and bought me this book.
She said, "I want you to think of me while you read it."
I said, "It's about a horrible crazy mother."
She said, "Then think about how lucky you are to have a lovely wonderful mother who's not like that."

Anyway, I feel uncomfortable with memoirs that are a bit like sitting in on someone's therapy sessions. But why? Do I think all emotions and trauma should be repressed?

There is a lot about overcoming a pretty abusive family situation through reading. An...more

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Apr 29, 2012 Cate rated it 5 of 5 stars

This isn't just a clever title. It's what Jeannette's adoptive mother says to her when Jeanette tells her mother that being with her girlfriend makes her happy.
My favorite quote, "Books don't make a home- they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space."

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May 12, 2013 Susan rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

As a book it is not difficult to read as the author has an easy style, almost conversational. She appears to have a very religious background as church and the activities around the church was her social life as a child. Mrs Winterson or Mrs W as the author calls her adoptive mother , was also very religious in the fact that she attended church and the events around the church including sort of family camps. And this appears to be the time she was happiest.
Mrs W was apparently a large lady who s...more As a book it is not difficult to read as the author has an easy style, almost conversational. She appears to have a very religious background as church and the activities around the church was her social life as a child. Mrs Winterson or Mrs W as the author calls her adoptive mother , was also very religious in the fact that she attended church and the events around the church including sort of family camps. And this appears to be the time she was happiest.
Mrs W was apparently a large lady who spent most of the time being miserable. Jeanette spent many a night locked out of the house sitting on the doorstep, sometimes she was lucky and the adoptive father returned and let her in. He appears to have not ever challenged Mrs W and she never made a scene when Jeanette was let in again. The adoptive parents never slept together so if father was home Mrs W got up and did baking and so on all night and then went to bed during the day. For some time young Jeanette shared the room but they they created a bathroom and small bedroom for her so that they had an upstairs bathroom not just the outside loo.

The story she tells is quite shocking; not by social service standards but still she had a very strange childhood as Mrs W pied on her the whole time. She wasn’t allowed book sin the house even though Mrs W did read aloud to J and the father on some evenings. She did censor the books though as J found out whe she re read them herself.
Considering this strange up bringing it is a wonder that this lady ended up at Oxford and became the author she is today. She has been able to use her experiences and create her writing from these. A bit like many talented artist who are very emotionally unstable yet create amazing pictures.

I was amazed how open and candid her writing was and indeed Mrs W was not impressed at all with ‘Oranges’ and I imagine this one won’t be too popular either with her. The title comes from when J had a relationship with another girl. She told Mrs W that this girl made her happy when she was with her. Te answer she got from Mrs W was the title of the book!

I did find that the author told a fairly heart wrenching story but somehow managed to inject her own sort of humour which lightened the read. The quote on the front of the book from the Sunday Times sums it up perfectly : “ Brave, funny, hearbreaking.” What I find interesting is that the book dedicated to her “Three mothers” The woman who adopted her Constance Winterson, Ruth Rendell, the author who is a very close friend and Anne who is her birth mother whom she managed to trace during the writing of this book.

Despite finding this interesting and easy to read, I can’t say I will go rushing to find more of this author’s work. I am not sure what it is but somehow I found here soul bearing a little too much; I didn’t mind the parts when she was a child but I am not sure I wanted to read about her lesbian relationships as that to me is like talking about your marriage and your sex life which I find too personal and not something I want to share with the world at large.

I would certainly be upset if my husband wrote a book about our relationship and published it so I am not sure how her lovers/ partners would feel about being put into print for everyone to read. I am certainly not at all tempted to read’ Oranges’ after reading this book. Some of her other may be less personal. It wasn’t that this was openly discussing her sex life , it was more about her feelings and emotions that I found a bit too personal.

I suspect some of her other books might be less of her personal story so might give one of those a try if I come across one for free but I wouldn’t spend good money on them. They are well written and I can’t quite put my finger on why I wasn’t too keen on this one but it just didn’t do it for me. I smiled at some things and felt annoyed at other and very sorry that a young girl should have been put into that situation but it just missed it for me.
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May 08, 2013 Suman rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I confess that mid way through the book, I was bored of the author ranting about her mother.The first half of the book is sad, and very depressing. But I persisted only because I did not want to get into the habit of abandoning a book midway. Plus, the author has a way with words that was hard to resist. I am glad that I continued because the second half of the book is where the real story is - that of Jeanette Winterson, how she became who she became because of the hardships and the loneliness...more

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May 05, 2013 Susan rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: nonfiction, memoir

Jeanette Winterson's story is one of tragedy and self-discovery. Her painful childhood creates a certain cynicism toward life that I find heartbreaking. Her observations are symbolic of a life lived without Christ. She correctly identifies the complexities and contradictions we face as humans living in a fallen world, but she fails to find the answer. Perhaps most heartbreaking of all, she rejects Christianity and Christ because of the faulty picture she saw in her family growing up. As the adop...more

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May 03, 2013 Ziggy rated it 4 of 5 stars

'When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold. ... When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.'

This autobiography is Jeanette Winterson's attempt to bridge the gap between the said and the unsaid, to make the silence speak. Speak it does, tha...more

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May 01, 2013 Lisa rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: biography, first-reads

Sometimes a book expresses a concept in a way that captures the essence of the idea, rounds it out and paints it in full color for you as a reader. One theme in this book is the nature of 'truth'. What do we choose to share with others, and what do we omit? What are we able to express and what are we compelled to hide lest it tear us apart? Can our omissions say as much about the 'truth' as the words we choose to put in. Years ago Tracy Chapman's 'Telling Stories' song explored the same ideas, a...more

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Apr 29, 2013 Erika Théron rated it 5 of 5 stars

Although I make a point of not having a 'favourite book', if I ever decide to change this policy, 'Oranges' would be a top contender. It's well-known that 'Oranges' is - to a degree - autobiographical, so I didn't quite know what 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal' could offer, being the former's 'silent twin'. Plus, as another rule, I don't enjoy reading non-fiction. Thank goodness I broke this rule for Miss Winterson. Jeanette Winterson is famous for saying she reads herself as both fact a...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Susanna rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: memoir

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I'm going to go ahead and give this book five stars! At the beginning of the book, I did some grumbling about why on earth this book has gotten such raves. Winterson's writing style is definitely unique -- I haven't read a lot of her work, and haven't read her for a while, but her style is so distinctive, at times rambling, at times proletariat, and then at times she lances you with a streak of her brilliant intellectualism. This tale is structured in a sort of novella-length memoir about her gr...more

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Mar 27, 2013 Z Tuck rated it 4 of 5 stars

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 t...more 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.
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Mar 20, 2013 Ameem0 rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

*****I HAVE NOT READ THIS BOOK YET*****

***I GAVE IT 5 STARS SO MORE PEOPLE CAN SEE THIS "REVIEW" & HOPEFULLY DONATE***

I would like to recommend this book to all mothers. Be it mothers who have healthy children, disabled children, are trying for children, cannot have children, mourn for their children, are pregnant with a child, don't live with their children, etc. I feel cold and harsh for writing etc. but I do know that I have most likely left some scenarios out. I've read some of the comme...more

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Mar 18, 2013 Barbara A rated it 4 of 5 stars

I've neither read "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" nor seen the BBC adaption, which I know to have been wildly popular. I certainly know who Jeanette Winterson is, but I was drawn to this memoir not because of her fame, but because it was on the NYT Best Books of 2012 list, and because I thought the title was funny and mildly sardonic.

Reader, I warn you. The title is the cruelest quote, straight from a mother's lips, that I have ever read. It's been jangling around in my mind all weekend. What...more

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Mar 14, 2013 Diane rated it 4 of 5 stars

Jeanette Winterson wrote a critically acclaimed novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, loosely based on her life growing up in a Northern England industrial town. Her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, is the non-fiction version of that story.

The looming figure in both books is Winterson's adopted mother, who is always referred to in the book as Mrs. Winterson. Her parents were Pentecostal and her mother raised Jeanette to become a missionary. Mrs. Winterson was abusive, frequently...more Jeanette Winterson wrote a critically acclaimed novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, loosely based on her life growing up in a Northern England industrial town. Her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, is the non-fiction version of that story.

The looming figure in both books is Winterson's adopted mother, who is always referred to in the book as Mrs. Winterson. Her parents were Pentecostal and her mother raised Jeanette to become a missionary. Mrs. Winterson was abusive, frequently locking Jeanette out of the house overnight, leaving her to freeze on the porch steps.

During those long nights, it was books that saved young Jeanette. That was where she fell in love with language and books, and where she found truth, beauty and security in her lonely existence. Books saved her sanity and her life.

Mrs. Winterson spent much of her time at church meetings, and was always angry and disappointed in Jeanette. At the age of sixteen, Jeanette told her mother that she was in love with a woman and Mrs. Winterson uttered the phrase that became the book's title, "Why be happy when you can be normal?".

The fact that she was adopted affected her as well. Her mother wanted a boy and she finds some papers in her mother's things that confuse her. As expected, the confrontation with Mrs. Winterson about this does not go well.

Jeanette decided to try and find her birth mother and that journey is interesting. She searches long and hard and eventually finds her mother, although her own reaction to meeting her mother is much more complicated than she imagines.

Winterson's memoir, with its poetic language, gives hope to people who feel that they are different from everyone else around them, that life is too difficult. It can help them to find their own voice as she found hers. One of the passages I marked is this one:
"A tough life needs a tough language- and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place."
Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? is a beautiful finding place for those who feel lost too.
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Mar 05, 2013 Simon rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition Recommends it for: Catalina Keller

Shelves: lgbt

I had never read any of Jeanette Winterson's novels before reading this memoir, and somehow I think not knowing her fiction made this excellent book more powerful. Winterson was adopted into a household of Pentecostal evangelists when she was a baby, and her childhood in the North of England is a kind of 20th century Dickensian nightmare that Winterson's liberal readers largely can't conceive of. The book charts Winterson's early acceptance of her lesbianism, budding feminism, and obsession with...more

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About Jeanette Winterson

Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assi...more Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.

One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Jeanette Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers' in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.

Her novels include Boating for Beginners (1985), published shortly after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and described by the author as 'a comic book with pictures'; The Passion (1987), twin narratives following the adventures of the web-footed daughter of a Venetian gondolier and Napoleon's chicken chef; Sexing the Cherry (1989), an invented world set during the English Civil War featuring the fabulous 'Dog Woman' and the orphan she raises; and three books exploring triangular relationships, gender and formal experimentation: Written on the Body (1992), Art and Lies (1994) and Gut Symmetries (1997). She is also the author of a collection of short stories, The World and Other Places (1998), and a book of essays about art and culture, Art Objects, published in 1995. Her novel The. PowerBook (2000) she adapted for the National Theatre in 2002. Jeanette Winterson's work is published in 28 countries. Her latest novel is The Battle of the Sun (2009). She has also edited Midsummer Nights (2009), a collection of stories inspired by opera, by contemporary writers, to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Glyndebourne Festival of Opera.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990, and also wrote Great Moments in Aviation, a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is also editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.

The King of Capri (2003) and Tanglewreck (2006) are children's stories. Lighthousekeeping (2004), centres on the orphaned heroine Silver, taken in by the keeper of the Cape Wrath lighthouse, Mr Pew, whose stories of love and loss, passion and longing, are interwoven in the narrative. Her most recent book is The Battle of the Sun (2009).

Jeanette Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. In 2006, she was awarded an OBE.

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“Why is the measure of love loss?” — 188 people liked it

“I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It is a finding place.” — 53 people liked it

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