Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

She was a flamboyant depressive;

matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for ‘best’.

I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world – a way of saying that she was here – a kind of X Marks the Spot.

I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice.

‘Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.’

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.

why could there not be experience and experiment? Why could there not be the observed and the imagined?

A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.

Truth for anyone is a very complex thing. For a writer, what you leave out says as much as those things you include.

the best of times and the worst of times were here – everything the machine could achieve, and the terrible human cost.

I didn’t want to live and die in the same place with only a week at the seaside in between.

what is terrible about industrialisation is that it makes escape necessary.

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.

fearful mix of nicotine and Jesus,

But as I try and understand how life works – and why some people cope better than others with adversity – 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.

The pursuit of happiness is more elusive; it is lifelong, and it is not goal-centred.

It seemed to me to be a lot of work to make a whole planet, a whole universe, and blow it up, but that is one of the problems with the literal-minded versions of Christianity; why look after the planet when you know it is all going to end in pieces?

All she ever wanted was for everyone to go away. And when I did she never forgave me.

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.

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

Growing up is difficult. Strangely, even when we have stopped growing physically, we seem to have to keep on growing emotionally, which involves both expansion and shrinkage, as some parts of us develop and others must be allowed to disappear . . . Rigidity never works; we end up being the wrong size for our world.

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.

Six books . . . my mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.

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

It was the place I was, not the place where I would be.

Dad was born in 1919, he was a celebratory end-of-First-World-War baby, and then they forgot to celebrate him. They forgot to look after him at all. He was the generation reared in time for the next war.

upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can’t grow up. They can get older, but they can’t grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won’t hit love in the face.

The rest of the time it was displayed.

My mother was awake all night and depressed all day. That was her pattern.

It was better to have some identity than none at all.

I am domestic, but only if the door is open.

I have noticed that doing the sensible thing is only a good idea when the decision is quite small. For the life-changing things, you must risk it.

‘This life is all mass. When we go, we’ll be all energy, that’s all there is to it.’

Her suffering was her armour. Gradually it became her skin. Then she could not take it off. She died without painkillers and in pain.

nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

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. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health.

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version.

I did not want to believe that love was such flimsy stuff. I held on tighter because Helen let go.

My mother’s eyes were like cold stars. She belonged in a different sky.

she was one of those electrical trapped women of a particular generation who are half mad because they are trapped, and half genius because they are trapped.

Were we endlessly ransacking the house, the two of us, looking for evidence of each other? I think we were – she, because I was fatally unknown to her, and she was afraid of me. Me, because I had no idea what was missing but felt the missing-ness of the missing.

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.

‘Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place. That is what Jung was explaining of course – as the chaos of our unconscious contents strive to find their rightful place in the index of consciousness.’

Love this idea

‘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.

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.