Jeanette Winterson is most famous for Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a novel that skirts the edges of memoir and wove some of her own, often painful, history into the words. Now, with Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, she brings the reader back to her story, the origin story of an adopted child with a complicated history, the sharp points of a life overshadowed by her adoptive mother and punctuated by a tenacious fight for freedom and the bright lights that literature snuck in.

This book is not solely a memoir. It is full of the details that make up a life, but Winterson has woven in impressions, meditations, and hints of the sort of wistfullness that make these stories, this story, as complicated as the life it is trying to echo. There is both more than the story of a life here, with meditations on words and literature and less, as Winterson herself admits to slipping past some parts of her life not yet ready for the focus required to turn them into written words.

Winterson was adopted as a baby, taken in without a history, without a story to tell herself of where she came from. Her adopted mother denies her even the weakest of roots; she is the “wrong baby”, the girl who will never belong, and she spends some of her childhood locked out of even the little home she has, consigned to the stoop all night, cold and hungry. Her adopted mother dominates the book, a towering force of personality and a terrifying force in Winterson’s world. She eclipses everyone around her, including Winterson’s adopted father, and her choices, her religion, and her obsessions, from bible verses to the devilry found in books, loom over every scene, pushing out even past Winterson’s choice to flee home. And yet, somehow, Winterson manages to keep herself the centre of the memoir, to prove that, in writing, she is the more powerful, the more adept, the more at home.

This is a small book, but because Winterson has decided to tell what matters instead of what was, she slips and slides into her strongest or most potent memories–drawing the picture of an entire childhood from detailed moments that define a life. Unsurprisingly, much of Winterson’s time was spent around words, in libraries, hidden in the outdoor loo reading, scrambling to hide forbidden books under a matress. She is more than aware of the power books had in her life, and of the impact words had on her working class community.

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 school 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.

This book is a memoir, but it is also a persuasive argument for classic literature in school, for libraries, and for the language found in the King James Bible. Winterson’s life is drama enough, but she widens the scope of the book to include meditations on what it means to be able to tell the story of a life, on the power of the stories in a community, on what it means to make the terrifying choice to be happy. She writes in lush and luminous prose of the terrible things, the wonderful things, and the everyday things; the bits of memory that make up a life.

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