Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

a flat earth theory of social relations.

I did not realise the consequences of privatising society.

We had carved up some countries and created others. When some of the world we had made by force wanted something in return, we were outraged.

syringes and tablets look kinder than padded cells and straitjackets but I am not so sure.

Life + art is a boisterous communion/communication with the dead. It is a boxing match with time.

I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact.

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.

I have done nothing about finding my past. It isn’t ‘my past’, is it? I have written over it. I have recorded on top of it. I have repainted it. Life is layers, fluid, unfixed, fragments. I never could write a story with a beginning, a middle and an end in the usual way because it felt untrue to me. That is why I write as I do and how I write as I do. It isn’t a method; it’s me.

Would havs been nice to get this in the beginning

The Passion: ‘I’m telling you stories. Trust me.’ Written on the Body: ‘Why is the measure of love loss?’ The PowerBook: ‘To avoid discovery I stay on the run. To discover things for myself, I stay on the run.’ Weight: ‘The free man never thinks of escape.’ The Stone Gods: ‘Everything is imprinted forever with what it once was.’

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

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?

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.

There was a person in me – a piece of me – however you want to describe it – so damaged that she was prepared to see me dead to find peace. That part of me, living alone, hidden, in a filthy abandoned lair, had always been able to stage a raid on the rest of the territory. My violent rages, my destructive behaviour, my own need to destroy love and trust, just as love and trust had been destroyed for me. My sexual recklessness – not liberation. The fact that I did not value myself. I was always ready to jump off the roof of my own life. Didn’t that have a romance to it? Wasn’t that the creative spirit unbounded? No.

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.

But making the ugly hurt part human again is not an exercise for the well-meaning social worker in us. This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb. That’s the problem – the awful thing is you. It may be split off and living malevolently at the bottom of the garden, but it is sharing your blood and eating your food. Mess this up, and you will go down with the creature.

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.

I cried in the way that you do when there is nothing but crying.

We have both been volatile and difficult people – with each other as well as with many others

we have both arrived at some sort of settlement with life; not a compromise, a settlement.

We’re back to the complexity of life that isn’t this thing or that thing – the boring old binary oppositions – it’s both, held in balance. So simple to write. So hard to do/be.

And the people I have hurt, the mistakes I have made, the damage to myself and others, wasn’t poor judgement; it was the place where love had hardened into loss.

A female parent is meant to be labyrinth-like and vengeful.

I could not smash the ice that separated me from myself, I could only let it melt,

I can juggle different and opposing ideas and realities easily. But I hate feeling more than one thing at once.