Three in One

Due to a sad combination of a rather amazing and depressing quality of mine I like to call single minded procrastination and the lack of internet in the middle of Anapoima, I did not complete the blog entries for the memoir we read during October break. I did finish the reading, it was the writing that was compromised by my apparently overtaking need to lie in the sun in fetal position and ignore college applications and other important responsibilities of life. So now without further ado and excuses I present a very late, very lonely, but extensive, three in one blog post about Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Throughout this entire memoir, Winterson keeps a very intense bitter tone about her childhood and her life in general. The psychological issues that come with being adopted, unacceptable in a small community, and utterly lonely in a broken family are strong in her and they are shown slowly throughout the entire book, getting more personal and complicated as she speaks of the more recent time in her life. One lead that accompanies her throughout the retelling of her life is the importance of language and reading as she began to discover who she was and what she wanted to do with her future. The bitterness, the epiphanies about language, and the overall satirical view Winterson takes on the forgotten town of Accrington which saw her grow up make this memoir unbelievably funny, honest, and profound.

The entire book starts with a chapter titled “The Wrong Crib” in which Winterson introduces the whole premise of her childhood as an orphan and the confusion over her adoptive parents. All her doubts are easy to understand; after all, why would someone adopt a child only to constantly tell them they are the “wrong crib”? Why would someone bother to go through the process of adoption only to ignore the child and refuse to love him/her? Later on in the memoir the answer to these questions is presented in the form of a stranded birth certificate for a boy. As it turns out, Mrs. Winterson was supposed to adopt Paul, but that didn’t work out and she was stuck with Jeanette instead. At the start of the story however this information is not disclosed as it isn’t really necessary to understand what Winterson is trying to explain: abandonment and silence. According to her “unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven” (page 9).  This intense feeling of incarceration in her own life brings the author to her first language epiphany: she needed words to escape the silence. 

As the book continues Winterson eventually discusses her sexuality, but one comes to a quick reassessment of the story as soon as she does. This memoir isn’t a story centered on sexuality and coming to terms with it. It is a story centered on what a messed up family and old-fashioned town can cause someone of a different sexuality. Winterson never needed to come to terms with being gay. Winterson never doubted that she was gay. Winterson suffered at the hands of her town for being gay. Throughout her childhood she was disliked and even hated by her adoptive mother, but this gets a million times worse when Mrs. Winterson finds out that she is gay. Once the rest of the town finds out about her sexuality she is exorcized, because clearly a person who isn’t a depressed heterosexual in an unhappy marriage must be possessed by the devil. The irony of it all is that the priest tries to rape her during the final stages of the exorcism in an attempt to convince her that “it would be better than with a girl” (page 81).

Eventually Winterson comes to the second epiphany about language by stating that the main thing literature offers is “a language powerful enough to say how it is” (page 40). This happens shortly after she discovers the library in Accrington and starts her journey through “English Literature in Prose A-Z”. Slowly she begins to create a stash of books under her mattress. Obviously in a house where there were only six books, one of which was the Bible and two of which were commentaries on the Bible, this stash was a problem. As a child, the only literature she had been exposed to was Jane Eyre, but this was corrupted by Mrs. Winterson who changed the story to make Jane Eyre marry the missionary and go off to help him. This shows us just how intent Mrs. Winterson was on keeping her “daughter” within the boundaries of the traditional structure of the town they inhabited. When Mrs. Winterson found the stash she burned all of Jeanette’s books, which leads us to the third epiphany: “Fuck it… I can write my own” (page 43).

I could go on and on about epiphanies in the book. I could write about how in the end Winterson discovers that “creativity is on the side of health- it isn’t the thing that drives us mad” (page 171). I could write about what it means that she calls her adoptive mother Mrs. Winterson throughout the entire memoir and how this indicates the resentment and bitterness she carries inside. I could even talk about her sanity crisis when she decided to look for her birth mother and all the epiphanies she continued to have about writing. I won’t do any of this. Both a literacy narrative and an extremely personal memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is worth reading and I’d rather not spoil more of it than I already have.