LoveReading Says
A 2013 World Book Night selection.
Shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards 'UK Author of the Year' 2012.
A companion to Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, allowing Jeanette Winterson to explore the truth (often far worse than the fictionalised version) behind her autobiographical novel. The power of the written word to a child is brilliantly captured, books allowing the author to escape and find her own life – to write her own words.
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In 1990 Jeanette Winterson published her funny, erudite, semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are not the only Fruit about a young girl growing up in an evangelical family rebelling religiously, socially and sexually. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the brilliant doppelganger to this novel, a memoir about belonging, exploring Winterson’s search for her birth mother, but also her love and relationship with books, as she writes, “Books don’t make a home…they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.” Brilliant for all fanatic readers and writers.
Susanna Crossman, from our Best Autobiographies Ever Blog.
Sue Baker
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Synopsis
"Magnificent . . . A tour de force of literature and love."?Vogue
"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is raucous. It hums with a dark refulgence from its first pages. . . . Singular and electric . . . [Winterson's] life with her adoptive parents was often appalling, but it made her the writer she is."?The New York Times
"[Winterson is] one of the most daring and inventive writers of our time?searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual expansion of herself and of us. . . . In Why Be Happy,, [Winterson's] emotional life is laid bare . . . [in] a bravely frank narrative of truly coming undone. For someone in love with disguises, Winterson's openness is all the more moving; there's nothing left to hide, and nothing left to hide behind."?Elle
Jeanette Winterson's bold and revelatory novels have earned her widespread acclaim, establishing her as a major figure in world literature. She has written some of the most admired books of the past few decades, including her internationally best-selling first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, that is now often required reading in contemporary fiction classes.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life's work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, which Winterson thought she had written over and repainted, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about other people's literature, one that shows how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft that supports us when we are sinking.
Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded search for belonging?for love, identity, home, and a mother.
About This Edition
| ISBN: |
9780802120878 |
| Publication date: |
25th April 2013 |
| Author: |
Jeanette Winterson |
| Publisher: |
Grove Press an imprint of Grove Atlantic |
| Format: |
Paperback |
| Pagination: |
230 pages |
| Primary Genre |
Biographies & Autobiographies
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| Other Genres: |
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| Recommendations: |
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