Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
-
-
4.3 • 65 Ratings
-
-
- £5.49
-
- £5.49
Publisher Description
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.
‘Unforgettable… It’s the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up’ Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?" Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) asks of her relationship with her adoptive mother, questions that haunt this raw memoir to its final pages. Winterson first finds solace in the Accrington Public Library in Lancashire, where she stumbles across T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and begins to cry: "the unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day." She is asked to leave the library for crying and sits on the steps in "the usual northern gale" to finish the book. The rest is history. Highly improbably for a woman of her class, she gets into Oxford and goes on to have a very successful literary career. But she finds that literature and literary success can only fulfill so much in her. There's another ingredient missing: love. The latter part of the book concerns itself with this quest, in which Winterson learns that the problem is not so much being gay (for which her mother tells her "you'll be in Hell") as it is in the complex nature of how to love anyone when one has only known perverse love as a child. This is a highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and endearing memoir.
Customer Reviews
Lovely
A beautiful and brutal thing x
Why Be Happy When You Could be Normal
Jeannette has done it again (!!) This book is brilliant and completely hit the satisfaction spot for me. I devoured it as if I were reading a mirror story to my own which was in fact, very different, despite coming from a working class northern town, which was similar. It is a piece of superb writing, covering the emotional depths of the human heart and heartbreak. In the many forms it takes. I love the bit where Jeanette decides to ' choose life' and slowly emerges from the depths of depression. It reminded me of the poem in the film The Piano where Ada unties her leg from the rope and also chooses life. Totally inspiring in so many ways. If you are a 'thinker' then read this, you won't be dissapointed.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal
Stunningly powerful and moving book. Having never read any of Jeanette Winterson's other books this took me to places in myself I usually prefer not to visit...both terrifying and at times hilarious it has instilled in me a strong sense of empathy with and compassion for the writer. Thank you.