Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson

A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That

whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.

It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.

there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you.

I am not messy, I am organised, and I cook and clean very happily, but another presence is hard for me.

For the life-changing things, you must risk it. And

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

We were not lovers, we were love.

It was a terrible thing to say to her. That is why I said it.

She said, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’

looking at women was a way of looking at myself and, I suppose, a way of loving myself.

‘Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.’

‘When a woman alone is no longer of any interest to the opposite sex, she is only visible where she has some purpose.’

I 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.

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

I was thinking about suicide because it had to be an option. I had to be able to think about it and on good days I did so because it gave me back a sense of control – for one last time I would be in control.

I did not want to vacate life. I loved life. I love life. Life is too precious to me not to live it fully. I thought, ‘If I cannot live then I must die.’

that double identity, itself a kind of schizophrenia – my sense of myself as being a girl who’s a boy who’s a boy who’s a girl. A doubleness at the heart of things.

It is a memoir about living with dogs – actually it is a story about living with life. Living with life is very hard.

Going mad takes time. Getting sane takes time.

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.

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.

I guess that over the last few years I have come home. I have always tried to make a home for myself, but I have not felt at home in myself. I have worked hard at being the hero of my own life, but every time I checked the register of displaced persons, I was still on it. I didn’t know how to belong. Longing? Yes. Belonging? No.

Happy endings are only a pause. There are three kinds of big endings: Revenge. Tragedy. Forgiveness.