Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking.

tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.

The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it.

A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father.

I was like a flare sent out into the world

She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.

If I was locked out overnight I sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school.

and there she was – who needs Skype? I could see her through her voice, her form solidifying in front of me as she talked.

She would have done her face powder (keep yourself nice), but not lipstick (fast and loose).

I was trying to get away from the received idea that women always write about ‘experience’ – the compass of what they know – while men write wide and bold – the big canvas, the experiment with form.

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.

The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

That isn’t of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the spa...

It’s why I am a writer – I don’t say ‘decided’ to be, or ‘became’. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is.

I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story.

me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind.

And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other on...

hurt(ling) force of Mother.

I wrote her in because I couldn’t bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I really wished it had been that way. When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend. There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that.

Embroidering THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED on my gym bag made me easy to spot.

It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself. I never believed

I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss?

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include. What lies beyond the margin of the text?

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.

Mrs Winterson was unhappy and we had to be unhappy with her.

Life was a pre-death experience.

that is the story of industrialisation, and it has a despair in it, and an excitement in it, and a brutality in it, and poetry in it, and all of those things are in me.

the necessaries.

and in spite of important work by Winnicott, Bowlby and Balint on attachment, and the trauma of early separation from the love object that is the mother, a screaming baby wasn’t a broken-hearted baby – she was a Devil baby.

I was very often full of rage and despair. I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.

any refusal, to be broken lets in enough light and air to keep believing in the world – the dream of escape.

‘What I want does exist if I dare to find it …’

the universe is a cosmic dustbin – and after I had thought about this for a bit, I asked her if the lid was on or off. ‘On,’ she said. ‘Nobody escapes.’

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. Not in the me-first way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream …

There are times when it will go so wrong that you will barely be alive, and times when you realise that being barely alive, on your own terms, is better than living a bloated half-life on someone else’s terms.

There is a lot that you can’t change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey …

I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

For the people I knew, books were few and stories were everywhere, and how you tell ’em was everything. Even an exchange on a bus had to have a narrative. ‘They’ve no money so they’re having their honeymoon in Morecambe.’ ‘That’s a shame – there’s nowt to do in Morecambe once you’ve had a swim.’ ‘I feel sorry for ’em.’ ‘Aye, but it’s only a week’s honeymoon – I know a woman who spent all her married life in Morecambe.’ Ask not for whom the bell tolls …

She believed in miracles, even though she never got one – well, maybe she did get one, but that was me, and she didn’t know that miracles often come in disguise.

I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything – the miracle – is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves.

In Shakespeare’s use of the magic potion, it is not that the object of desire itself is altered – the women are who they are – rather that the man is forced to see them differently.

Do we see what we think we see?

Sometimes, often, a part of us is both volatile and powerful – the towering anger that can kill you and others, and that threatens to overwhelm everything. We can’t negotiate with that powerful but enraged part of us until we teach it better manners – which means getting it back in the bottle to show who is really in charge. This isn’t repression, but it is about finding a container. In therapy, the therapist acts as a container for what we daren’t let out, because it is so scary, or what lets itself out every so often, and lays waste to our lives.

Yes, that is a contradiction, but our contradictions are never so to ourselves.

Thank God her last name was Austen …

Haha

The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.

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.

whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe. I

Beowulf

B99!!!!!!!!!