Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.

The photographer frames the shot; writers frame their world.

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.

In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community – to society?

My new mother had a lot of problems with the body – her own, my dad’s, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mix of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort, and suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body.

She had lost something. It was a big something. She had lost/was losing life.

Adopted children are dislodged. My mother felt that the whole of life was a grand dislodgement. We both wanted to go Home.

Our gas oven blew up. The repairman came out and said he didn’t like the look of it, which was unsurprising as the oven and the wall were black. Mrs Winterson replied, ‘It’s a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature.’ That is a heavy load for a gas oven to bear.

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.

‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.’