Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

When I was sixteen I had only got as far as M – not counting Shakespeare, who is not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour. Black is all the colours and Shakespeare is all the alphabet.

Poetry is easier to learn than prose. Once you have learned it you can use it as a light and a laser. It shows up your true situation and it helps you cut through it.

Had we but world enough, and time … World enough, and time: I was young, so I had time, but I knew I had to find world – I didn’t even have a room of my own.

Here he is, much better than me:

I thought, ‘If I can’t stay where I am, and I can’t, then I will put all that I can into the going.’ I began to realise that I had company. Writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways and castaways. These writers were my friends. Every book was a message in a bottle. Open it.

Katherine Mansfield – a writer whose short stories are as far away from any life experience I had had at sixteen. But that was the point. Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become. Emily Dickinson barely left her homestead in Amherst, Massachusetts, but when we read, ‘My life stood – a loaded gun’ we know we have met an imagination that will detonate life, not decorate it.

It was never a question of biology or nature and nurture. I know now that we heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don’t heal by forming a secret society of one – by obsessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment. Mrs Winterson was her own secret society, and she longed for me to join her there. It was a compulsive doctrine, and I carried it forward in my own life for a long time. It is of course the basis of romantic love – you + me against the world. A world where there are only two of us. A world that doesn’t really exist, except that we are in it. And when one of us fails the other … And one of us will always fail the other.

I had no idea whether any of what I was doing was the right thing to do. I talked to myself all the time, out loud, debating with myself my situation. I was lucky in one way because our church had always emphasised how important it is to concentrate on good things – blessings – not just bad things. And that is what I did at night when I curled up to sleep in my sleeping bag.

and she never took holidays because she said – and I will never forget it: ‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’

She adored men, even though the lack of one rendered her invisible in her own eyes – the saddest place in the township of invisible places a woman can occupy.

Northern women were tough, and reckoned that way in the home and in popular comedy – all the seaside postcards were drawings of weedy little men and dominating women – and in the drunken working men’s clubs, stage acts like Les Dawson dressed up in headscarves and aprons, parodying, but also celebrating, the formidable women the men loved, feared, and were dependent upon. Yet those women who were supposed to stand at the door waiting to whack their men with a rolling pin had no economic clout. And when they had, they hid it.

I was a woman. I was a working-class woman. I was a woman who wanted to love women without guilt or ridicule. Those three things formed the basis of my politics, not the unions, or class war as understood by the male Left.

I felt like Jude the Obscure in Thomas Hardy’s novel, and I was determined not to hang myself.

So fucking brave. I am so proud of you.

that sense of energetic quiet that I still find so seductive.

I had been given overnight accommodation, and meals were provided in college, but I was too intimidated by the confidence of the other candidates to go in and eat with them. I was unable to speak clearly during my interviews because for the first time in my life I felt that I looked wrong and sounded wrong. Everybody else seemed relaxed, though I am sure that was not true. They certainly had better clothes and different accents. I knew I was not being myself, but I didn’t know how to be myself there. I hid the self that I was and had no persona to put in its place.

ON OUR FIRST evening as undergraduates, our tutor turned to me and said, ‘You are the working-class experiment.’ Then he turned to the woman who was to become and remain my closest friend, and he said, ‘You are the black experiment.’

Oxford was not a conspiracy of silence as far as women were concerned; it was a conspiracy of ignorance.

But in spite of its sexism, snobbery, patriarchal attitudes and indifference to student welfare, the great thing about Oxford was its seriousness of purpose and the unquestioned belief that the life of the mind was at the heart of civilised life.

I was wondering this because I was thinking of visiting Mrs Winterson. That there might be a level we can reach above the ordinary conflict is a seductive one. Jung argued that a conflict can never be resolved on the level at which it arises – at that level there is only a winner and a loser, not a reconciliation. The conflict must be got above – like seeing a storm from higher ground.

There is a sense of the human spirit as always existing. This makes our own death bearable. Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

‘that which is only living/Can only die’.

That’s time’s arrow, the flight from womb to tomb. But life is more than an arrow.

I never wanted to find my birth parents – if one set of parents felt like a misfortune, two sets would be self-destructive.

I had no idea that you could like your parents, or that they could love you enough to let you be yourself.

Poor Dad – did he ever expect to outlive two wives?

a kind of MOT of Baby: I was not a mental defective. I was well enough to be adopted. I had been breastfed

There is a past after all, no matter how much I have written over it.

Then a string of lines starts replaying in my head – lines from my own books – ‘I keep writing this so that one day she will read it.’ ‘Looking for you, looking for me, I guess I’ve been looking for us both all my life …’

I have written love narratives and loss narratives – stories of longing and belonging. It all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my mother. But mother is our first love affair. Her arms. Her eyes. Her breast. Her body. And if we hate her later, we take that rage with us into other lovers. And if we lose her, where do we find her again?

The Grail legend is there – one glimpse and the most precious thing in the world is gone forever, and then the quest is to find it again.

The Winter’s Tale. My favourite Shakespeare play:

My agony over calling Deborah and finding that she would never return my calls, my bewilderment and rage, these emotional states were taking me nearer to the sealed door where I had never wanted to go.

That makes it sound like a conscious choice. The psyche is much smarter than consciousness allows. We bury things so deep we no longer remember there was anything to bury. Our bodies remember. Our neurotic states remember. But we don’t.

On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope. The rope was poetry. All that poetry I learned when I had to keep my library inside me now offered a rescue rope.

The world was beautiful. I was a speck in it.

penalty for that.’

Which you don't have to pay!

Herman Hesse called suicide a state of mind – and there are a great many people, nominally alive, who have committed a suicide much worse than physical death. They have vacated life.

I did not want to vacate life. I loved life. I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully. I thought, ‘If I cannot live then I must die.’

My time was up. That was the strongest feeling I had. The person who had left home at sixteen and blasted through all the walls in her way, and been fearless, and not looked back, and who was well known as a writer, controversially so (she’s brilliant, she’s rubbish), and who had made money, made her way, been a good friend, a volatile and difficult lover, who had had a couple of minor breakdowns and a psychotic per...

I know I was having an hallucination but it was the hallucination I needed to have. ‘Ye must be born again.’ ‘Ye must be born again’ (John 3:7).

I understood twice born was not just about being alive, but about choosing life. Choosing to be alive and consciously committing to life, in all its exuberant chaos – and its pain.

The door had swung open. I had gone in. The room had no floor. I had fallen and fallen and fallen. But I was alive. And that night the cold stars made a constellation from the pieces of my broken mind. There was no straight-line connection. You can tell that reading this. I want to show how it is when the mind works with its own brokenness.

It takes courage to feel the feeling – and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?

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

Creativity is on the side of health – it isn’t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.

It began as all important things begin – by chance. From then on, every day, I wrote a book for children called The Battle of the Sun. Every day I went to work, without a plan, without a plot, to see what I had to say.

I was going to get better, and getting better began with the chance of the book. It is not a surprise that it was a children’s book. The demented creature in me was a lost child. She was willing to be told a story. The grown-up me had to tell it to her.

She was a toddler, except that she was other ages too, because time doesn’t operate on the inside as it does on the outside. She was sometimes a baby. Sometimes she was seven, sometimes eleven, sometimes fifteen.

A few months later we were having our afternoon walk when I said something about how nobody had cuddled us when we were little. I said ‘us’, not ‘you’. She held my hand. She had never done that before; mainly she walked behind shooting her sentences. We both sat down and cried. I said, ‘We will learn how to love.’

I did know what ‘redacted’ meant, but I wondered if other people did (can’t you just say ‘the edited version’?), and I wondered what such a cold and formal letter does to people in the heated and upsetting process of looking for your other life.