“Our Life At Home Was a Bit Odd.” – Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

I’ve written a lot about Jeanette Winterson. You can check out the archive, if you feel so inclined. She is one of my favorite authors writing today. So much so that when I didn’t care for her work (there was a middle period there where she lost me), I stuck with it. I have read every word she has written. I will follow her anywhere. She is mainly known for her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which is rather breathtaking and bold, written at the very young age of 25. She burst out of the cannon, almost fully formed. It was extraordinary. The book is unlike anything else. Or maybe, if I had to compare, I would say it is like Grimm’s Fairy Tales, or The Arabian Nights, with a meta-level of information (the lead character’s name is Jeanette) that put her strongly at the forefront of the zeitgeist of the day. She was a “woman writer” (damn that phrase), who could never be painted with the “she just writes domestic novels” brush (which is ridiculous, in any case: Does not Jonathan Franzen write domestic novels? Does not Don DeLillo? The way we talk about women writers needs to change.) Oranges won her all kinds of prizes, and it was turned into a BBC movie which, to this day, is one of the most successful things they’ve ever done, in terms of viewership. But that was just the beginning. The first book I read of hers was Sexing the Cherry and I found her style funny and original and attention-getting. Then I picked up The Passion, and it is one of my favorite books of all time. It is one of the most exhilarating reading experiences I have ever had. The prose left me breathless. Her confidence, her poetry, and the story itself! A French cook for Napoleon meets a webbed-footed crossdressing boatman’s daughter from Venice. It is difficult to explain, and quintessentially Winterson-ish. Her style is remarkable and so much itself. I am not sure I would have fallen as in love with her books if I had started with Oranges, which is more of a memoir dressed up as a monstrous fairy tale: she is the ultimate unreliable narrator (one of her key themes), and I loved her for it, but The Passion is sheer fiction. I’m not a big memoir person. Winterson is prolific, too, another reason I love her. New books from her are like an event. She seems so out there. My thoughts run along the lines of, “So …. what is she up to NOW?” She is mischievous, confident, fearless, she has a giant ego, and the talent to match. Her books will last. She is a very important voice.

Her career has been stormy. She was embraced wholeheartedly because of Oranges, not just by the literary and critical establishment (“a new and unique voice, and OMG she’s a woman, and OMG she’s working class, even better!”) but also by the gay literature world, because of its gay theme. This is something Winterson has bucked against, and rightly so: I am happy for her fight to be regarded as a writer, not owned by a special interest group. She also believes sexuality is fluid (Orlando is one of her favorite books, with its fluid flexible identities and gender-swapping), something which is a no-no in more “correct” circles, but she refuses to budge. She will not be labeled as a Lesbian Writer. She is not a poster child. So because of this, many of the same people who embraced her turned their back on her. They rejected her with the same ferocity they accepted her. While this may be a common experience, it is no less upsetting.

However, as I mentioned, Winterson has an ego that rivals James Joyce’s and Elvis Presley’s, and good for her. She just kept on keeping on. She wrote what she wanted to write, what made sense for her to write. The power of those first novels was such that I hung on there with her. Sure, I’ll read Art and Lies and The Power Book, sure, Jeanette! I’m a loyal fan – but more than that, and this is difficult: I respect the artist’s right to follow her own path. I do not judge her as lacking because she is not doing what I feel she should be doing. It’s similar to those who call Liz Phair a “sell out”. I have contempt for such people, I should warn you. One of the job descriptions of an artist is NOT “plays well with others” or “does the expected safe thing”. James Joyce came out with Ulysses and then worked for 17 years on Finnegans Wake. Critically and financially, that was an absurd choice and not at all practical. Well, if you want practical, I’m not sure why you’re looking at artists to provide you with good role models. Jeanette Winterson’s career existed on that fault line of acclaim/controversy/disdain that I find fascinating, and she had the strength to not buckle under to everyone who wanted her to just keep writing Oranges all over again, or write books that validated THEIR experience. She was constitutionally recalcitrant, and constitutionally rebellious.

Oranges is seen as autobiographical in nature, and it is in many ways, although the structure is odd and does not feel like any other autobiography you may have read. It’s fantastical, monstrous, and you wonder if she’s just making this shit up. The facts are well-known (if you have read Oranges that is). Jeanette Winterson grew up in Manchester. She was adopted as a baby. She did not know who her real parents were. The people who adopted her were evangelicals, of the handing-out-tracts-the-End-Days-are-upon-us variety. Jeanette was raised in that world. They spent all day in church on Sunday, and every night of the week was booked with some church activity. Her mother would leave Bible verses all over the house. Her mother was a bit “off”, you can feel that in Oranges. She would lock Jeanette out of the house throughout Jeanette’s childhood. Some of Jeanette’s earliest memories are of sitting on the doorstoop all day long, hungry and cold, waiting to be let in. Her mother would have thought the Westboro Baptist lunatics were right on the money. She saw hell and damnation whereever she looked, and life was a vale of tears anyway: she hated life and couldn’t wait for it to be over. So what a horror to find that the child she adopted, whom she never really seemed to love anyway, was kissing GIRLS. Jeanette left home at 16 years old. She walked out and never looked back. She lived in her car. She worked at a market. She read voraciously. She was still going to school and she decided to apply to Oxford. (Like I said, the girl never lacked ego.) She got in. She published Oranges at 25, and became an instant celebrity. This is all there in Oranges. It’s a horrifying book in many ways, with its bleak picture of loveless harsh evangelically-driven parents, and a little girl locked out of the house. But it’s also hilarious. Jeanette Winterson has a gigantic sense of humor and loves language the way Joyce loved it, the way TS Eliot loved it, the way Virginia Woolf loved it. People who love language to that degree are often funnier than regular people, because they understand the absurdity of meaning and the fluctuating nature of the words we choose to say. Most of our great comedians have been geniuses in terms of analyzing language. You can’t believe that Mrs. Winterson is as monstrous as she seems. She would stay up all night knitting and listening to evangelical radio. She would scream at neighbors about Jesus, she would shout on street corners. Could this woman have existed? Yes, she did. She exists on the pages of Oranges and is an unforgettable character. She shows up again in Sexing the Cherry, a novel about a giantess who lives on the banks of the River Thames during the Elizabethan era.

Oranges is not a particularly compassionate book. The youth are rarely compassionate when it comes to the failings of their own parents. The book’s lack of compassion is one of its greatest strengths and why it is so mean and funny. It is a vicious hilarious self-aggrandizing book, with an unforgettable voice at the center of it. You feel you would follow that voice anywhere, because surely she knows the way. How can it be that she is only 25?

Then came The Passion, a masterpiece, and Sexing the Cherry, a fantastical and brilliant book. Written on the Body, about one of Winterson’s main themes, unrequited love, was adored by many circles and there are many who count that as their favorite Winterson book. I respect that, believe me, but it was around the time of Written on the Body that Winterson started to bore me. But her prose was always so compelling, so unique, I read it all. Art & Lies was impenetrable to me, and The PowerBook and Gut Symmetries felt like re-treads of Written on the Body: same voice, same meandering non-plot, same often-brilliant treatises on love, but I felt that her prose became disconnected at that time from story and Narrative. That was probably her point. The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are often truer than the actual facts. She was working shit out for herself. Love is her theme. It obsessed her. The critics bashed Art and Lies, and around that time some weird stories started coming out about Winterson’s behavior. Whatever, that never interested me. Of course she’s an eccentric. She’s an artist. Of course she’s an obsessive lover who can’t let go of her lovers. Haven’t you read her books?? Why is this a surprise? She wrote children’s books, too, many of which I found didactic, in a way her other books were not. She wrote a re-telling of the Hercules myth, called Weight, that I absolutely adored.

Winterson is best when there is an element of myth and magic in her stories. She loves Stories with a capital S. After all, she grew up immersed in the Bible, which includes some of the greatest stories ever told.

Winterson is always on my radar. If she is interviewed, I read it. If there is a critical analysis of her work, I am all over it. There is something about her that hooked me – early – from the very first line of The Passion, and she has never let me go since. I thank her for that.

So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that Winterson was publishing a memoir. I’m not a big memoir person, although I do make exceptions, but my general feeling is: I honestly don’t care that you grew up in a shack and your Mama beat you. If that’s all you have to tell me, I don’t care. (Unless you’re my friend, that is. I care about my friends’ narratives. With people who decide to publish them, however, I am much more unforgiving and indifferent.) There is a premium placed on “Reality” right now that I find downright disturbing. It leaves no room for art. The blow-up about Zero Dark Thirty, by morons who hadn’t even seen the damn thing yet, is a great example. Even documentaries are a slant on the truth. They’re a “take”. If you want facts listed with no editorial tone, go read Wikipedia. I don’t understand. Was Frank McCourt being literally truthful in Angela’s Ashes? Not according to the people in Limerick. Was it an entertaining book, with an unforgettable voice telling it? Yes. Jeanette Winterson is someone who seems to register to me like a blinking star from outer space, trying to communicate to me, desperate to get her message out. I am thrilled whenever she chooses to communicate.

Besides, I had read Oranges. I had enjoyed it as a fantastical piece of fiction and fact intermingled. But what else would she have to say?

The book is called Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. It came out and the rave reviews started pouring in. It won prizes, it was on Best of the Year lists across the map. I feel strangely invested in Jeanette Winterson. I have been reading her for so long. I am so pleased for her.

But nothing could have prepared me, believe it or not, for the powerhouse of a book that Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is. I cried openly while reading it. I also laughed out loud. I also had to read sections out loud to nearby friends, just to revel in her prose. But what I am present to right now is the sheer honesty of the book, its mess and complexity, her trailing-off ellipses at the end of paragraphs, as though she is saying, “There’s more to say here, but let’s just let that hang there for a bit …”, and her brutal honesty about not only her childhood but what that childhood did to her psyche. You hear these awful stories about orphans adopted from orphanages in Romania who come to the United States and although their adoptive parents love them, the children are never able to “attach”. They hoard food. They lie. They tell tall tales. Sometimes they call CPS on their adoptive parents, even though no abuse is going on. All of this makes perfect sense when you imagine a baby lying in a filthy crib for two years, never being held. Of course saying “I love you” is meaningless to such a creature. Of course “You’re safe” is seen as a laughable statement to someone who has been through that experience (even if they can’t consciously remember it). Jeanette Winterson had a horror of a childhood, haunted by the other life she might have had, with her mysterious birth parents who gave her up and she never knew why.

And yet, it wasn’t all bad. She enjoyed church, and loved the simple lesson of that kind of faith: You are worthy, you are loved, pain is not all there is, and the point of life is not just to endure it, but to question it and to also try to be the best person you can be. These were powerful lessons, especially for the downtrodden Manchester working-class, of which she is a proud member. Working-class is an understatement. They had an outdoor bathroom, they all slept in the same room, and their money always ran out mid-week. Jeanette’s adoptive father was relatively useless: at least he did nothing to shield Jeanette from the abuse heaped on her by his wife. Jeanette’s adoptive mother told her that the Devil had brought them the wrong baby, the Devil had brought them to the “wrong crib”. Jeanette believed this implicitly. But abuse like that can do a couple of different things: it can crush someone’s spirit, or it can make someone a rebel. Or it can do both. Jeanette Winterson is not interested in either/or and she never has been. She is interested in multiple levels of reality and perception, where you can be in two places at the same time, where “either/or” makes no sense – it is all included, it is all true. Her spirit was shattered, AND she became a huge fiery rebel which saved her life. Both are true. Her rebellion (she was a bad student, she was a lesbian, she got in fist fights) was not just a matter of survival, but a matter of choosing Life over Death, not an easy prospect in her household, where her mother basically waited for death … or the Apocalypse … whichever one came first.

In the last 10 years, Jeanette Winterson went on a quest to find her birth parents. This search takes up the final three chapters of the book, and tears poured down my face. It’s not just the events that are emotional: it is her manner of writing. (This is why I say I’m not big on memoirs unless you have a unique voice. I am not interested in your struggles with adoption unless you are ALSO a brilliant writer. Life’s too short and there are too many great books out there.) Jeanette Winterson is honest, painfully so, about what her childhood did to her (she does not trust love, she can never live with someone, she needs too much space, she is destroyed when a love affair ends), and she takes responsibility for her behavior, at the same time she embraces it. Her “issues” are what made her an artist. Her “issues” are what made her first couple of books make such an unforgettable impression. There’s a bravura aspect to Winterson’s prose. It’s a strip tease at times, an emotional exhibitionism, spiked with humor, vaudeville and fairy tales, that is difficult to describe but intensely pleasurable to read.

It’s a tour de force.

Some selections:

p. 3

She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself.

p. 5

There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.

It’s why I am a writer – I don’t say ‘decided’ to be, or ‘became’. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.

She said, ‘But it’s not true …’

True? This was a woman who explained the flash-dash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm.

p. 20

Babies are frightening – raw tyrants whose only kingdom is their own body. My new mother had a lot of problems with the body – her own, my dad’s, their bodies together, and mine. She had muffled her own body in flesh and clothes, suppressed its appetites with a fearful mixture of nicotine and Jesus, dosed it with purgatives that made her vomit, submitted it to doctors, who administered enemas and pelvic rings, subdued its desires for ordinary touch and comfort, and suddenly, not out of her own body, and with no preparation, she had a thing that was all body.

A burping, spraying, sprawling faecal thing blasting the house with rude life.

p. 23

The one good thing about being shut in a coal-hole is that it prompts reflection.

Read on its own that is an absurd sentence. 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. Not in the me-first kind of way that is the opposite of life and love, but with a salmon-like determination to swim upstream, however choppy upstream is, because this is your stream . . .

Which brings me back to happiness, and a quick look at the word.

Our primary meaning now is the feeling of pleasure and contentment; a buzz, a zestiness, the tummy upwards feel of good and right and relaxed and alive … you know …

But earlier meanings build in the hap – in Middle English, that is ‘happ’, in Old English, ‘gehapp’ – the chance or fortune, good or bad, that falls to you. Hap is your lot in life, the hand you are given to play.

How you meet your ‘hap’ will determine whether or not you can be ‘happy’.

What the Americans, in their constitution, call ‘the right to the pursuit of happiness’ (please note, not ‘the right to happiness’), is the right to swim upstream, salmon-wise.

p. 27

My mother was a good reader, confident and dramatic. She read the Bible as though it had just been written – and perhaps it was like that for her. I got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound. The words go on doing their work.

Working-class families in the north of England used to hear the 1611 Bible regularly at church and at home, and as there was still a ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ or ‘the’ in daily speech for us, the language didn’t seem too difficult. I especially liked ‘the quick and the dead’ – you really got a feel for the difference if you live in a house with mice and a mousetrap.

In the 1960s many men – and they were men not women – attended evening classes at the Working Men’s Institute or the Mechanics’ Institute – another progressive initiative coming out of Manchester. The idea of ‘bettering’ yourself was not seen as elitist then, neither was it assumed that all values are relative, nor that all culture is more or less identical – whether Hammer Horror or Shakespeare.

Those evening classes were big on Shakespeare – and none of the men ever complained that the language was difficult. Why not? It wasn’t difficult – it was the language of the 1611 Bible; the King James Version appeared in the same year as the first advertised performance of The Tempest. Shakespeare wrote The Winter’s Tale that year.

It was a useful continuity, destroyed by the well-meaning, well-educated types who didn’t think of the consequences for the wider culture to have modern Bibles with the language stripped out. The consequence was that uneducated men and women, men like my father, and kids like me in ordinary schools, had no more easy everyday connection to four hundred years of the English language.

A lot of the older people I knew, my parents’ generation, quoted Shakespeare and the Bible and sometimes the metaphysical poets like John Donne, without knowing the source, or misquoting and mixing.

p. 37

The library had all the Eng lit classics, and quite a few surprises like Gertrude Stein. I had no idea what to read or in what order, so I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen . . .

p. 40

I had no one to help me, but the T.S. Eliot helped me.

So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at schools because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. 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.

p. 46

Kids were slapped most days but beatings were less common. Kids fought all the time – boys and girls alike – and I grew up not caring much about physical pain. I used to hit my girlfriends until I realised it was not acceptable. Even now, when I am furious, what I would like to do is to punch the infuriating person flat on the ground.

That solves nothing, I know, and I’ve spent a lot of time understanding my own violence, which is not of the pussycat kind. There are people who could never commit murder. I am not one of those people.

p. 53

When I went deaf she didn’t take me to the doctor because she knew it was either Jesus stoppering up my ears to the things of the world in an attempt to reform my broken soul, or it was Satan whispering so loud that he had perforated my eardrums.

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

Mrs W was nothing if not old-fashioned. She knew that masturbation made you blind, so it was not difficult to conclude that it made you deaf too.

I thought this was unfair as a lot of people we knew had hearing aids and glasses.

p. 55

When I left the infant school in disgrace for burning down the play kitchen, the headmistress, who wore black tweed because she was in mourning for Scotland, told me mother that I was domineering and aggressive.

I was. I beat up the other kids, boys and girls alike, and when I couldn’t understand what was being said to me in a lesson I just left the classroom and bit the teachers if they tried to make me come back.

I realise my behaviour wasn’t ideal but my mother believed I was demon possessed and the headmistress was in mourning for Scotland. It was hard to be normal.

p. 94

The best sweet shop was run by two ladies who may or may not have been lovers. One was quite young, but the older one wore a woollen balaclava all the time – not the full-face version, but a balaclava nonetheless. And she had a moustache. But a lot of women had moustaches in those days. I never met anybody who shaved anything, and it didn’t occur to me to shave anything myself until I turned up at Oxford looking like a werewolf.

p. 100

We were not allowed books but we lived in a world of print. Mrs Winterson wrote out exhortations and stuck them all over the house.

Under my coat peg a sign said THINK OF GOD NOT THE DOG.

Over the gas oven, on a loaf wrapper, it said MAN SHALL NOT LIVE BY BREAK ALONE.

But in the outside loo, directly in front of you as you went through the door, was a placard. Those who stood up read LINGER NOT AT THE LORD’S BUSINESS.

Those who sat down read HE SHALL MELT THY BOWELS LIKE WAX.

p. 137

I left St Catherine’s and walked down Holywell Street to Blackwell’s bookshop. I had never seen a shop with five floors of books. I felt dizzy, like too much oxygen all at once. And I thought about women. All these books, and how long had it taken for women to be able to write their share, and why were there still so few women poets and novelists, and even fewer who were considered to be important?

I was so excited, so hopeful, and I was troubled too, by what had been said to me. As a woman would I be an onlooker and not a contributor? Could I study what I could never hope to achieve? Achieve it or not, I had to try.

And later, when I was successful, but accused of arrogance, I wanted to drag every journalist who misunderstood to this place, and make them see that for a woman, a working-class woman, to want to be a writer, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.