Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

It has taken me a long time to learn how to love – both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. 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?

Every day Mrs Winterson prayed, ‘Lord, let me die.’ This was hard on me and my dad.

She had other favourite lines. 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.

About her life to come, when she’d have a mansion and no neighbours. All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.

I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops.

After the rabbit and adenoids episode I was sent to school a year late. This was a worry because my mother called it the Breeding Ground – and when I asked her what exactly a Breeding Ground was, she said it was like the sink would be if she didn’t put bleach down it. She told me not to mix with the other children, who presumably had survived the bleach – anyway they were all very pale. I could read and write and add up and that was all that happened at school. In spite of my competence I was given bad reports in the way that bad children are given bad reports. I had accepted the bad label. It was better to have some identity than none at all. Most of the time I drew pictures of Hell which I took home for my mother to admire.