Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

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

to the arrogance of power and the delusions of wealth.

I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.

never asked her if she loved me. She loved me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.

Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.

did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon.

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

more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care.

Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be...

It is never too late to learn to love. But it is frightening.

Was love worth so little that it could be given up so easily?

So this is it – not Heathcliff, not Cathy, not Romeo and Juliet, not love laid end to end like a road across the world. I thought we could go anywhere. I thought we could be map and globe, route and compass. I thought we were each other’s world. I thought . . . We were not lovers, we were love.

We had no time for death. The war plus the Apocalypse plus eternal life made death ridiculous. Death/life. What did it matter as long as you had your soul?

think Mrs Winterson was afraid of happiness. Jesus was supposed to make you happy but he didn’t, and if you were waiting for the Apocalypse that never came, you were bound to feel disappointed. She thought that happy meant bad/wrong/sinful. Or plain stupid. Unhappy seemed to have virtue attached to it.

Fed words and shod with

them, words became clues. Piece by piece I knew they would lead me somewhere else.

I assumed that she hid books the way she hid everything else, including her heart, but our house was small and I searched it. 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.

We circled each other, wary, abandoned, full of longing. We came close but not close enough and then we pushed each other away forever.

On the top of the hill looking out over the town I wanted to see further than anybody had seen. That wasn’t arrogance; it was desire. I was all desire, desire for life.

Love was not a word that could be used between us any more. It was not a simple do you?/don’t you? Love was not an emotion; it was the bomb site between us.

It was too late for lines like that now. I had a language of my own and it wasn’t hers.

The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there.

Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.

Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible, unseen except in its effects.

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.

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.

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.

Yes, the past is another country, but one that we can visit, and once there we can bring back the things we need.

Literature is common ground. It is ground not managed wholly by commercial interests, nor can it be strip-mined like popular culture – exploit the new thing then move on.

There’s a lot of talk about the tame world versus the wild world. It is not only a wild nature that we need as human beings; it is the untamed open space of our imagi...

The medieval mind imagined itself as looking in – that Earth was a seedy outpost, Mrs Winterson’s cosmic dustbin – and that the centre was – well, at the centre – the nucleus of God’s order proceeding from love. I like it that order should proceed from love.

understood, in a very dimly lit way, that I would need to find the place where my own life could be reconciled with itself. And I knew that had something to do with love.

Time may be what stops everything happening at once, but time’s domain is the outer world. In our inner world, we can experience events that happened to us in time as happening simultaneously. Our non-linear self is uninterested in ‘when’, much more interested in ‘wherefore’.

Creative work bridges time because the energy of art is not time-bound. If it were we should have no interest in the art of the past, except as history or documentary. But our interest in art is our interest in ourselves both now and always. Here and forever. 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.

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 ...

Typewriters and yellow paper. So old. Those things look like a hundred years ago. I am a hundred years ago. Time is a gap.

have opened a door into a room with furniture I don’t recognise. There is a past after all, no matter how much I have written over it.

Like the name on the pieces of the paper – the name written over – my past is there – here – and it is now. The gap has closed around me. I feel trapped.

all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. It is my mother. It is my mother. It is my

This is the old present, the old loss still wounding each day.

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.

poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

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?

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.

Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it – and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.

The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don’t have to be alone. I