Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal

I was unaware of author Jeanette Winterson's fame (the BBC adaptation of her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit won a BAFTA for best drama) when I started this book, although she does talk about it in this straight out memoir of a miserable childhood in an adoptive home and her struggles to form strong close relationships as an adult. "When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’
 The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it. She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father." Also when she was angry, her mother would beat her, lock her in the coal hole, or lock her outside the house all night. If her father was working night shift, he would let her out/in when he got home. If not, she "sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school."
Winterson describes how literature and poetry saved her psychologically as a child and how the creative process of writing saved her as an adult. "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."
I am generally not a fan of memoirs (with some notable exceptions, like May Sarton's) and it was a struggle to get through this book for me. Still there were some very astute observations that I had to write down.
"Mental health and emotional continuity do not require us to stay in the same house or the same place, but they do require a sturdy structure on the inside--and that structure is built in part by what happened on the outside."
"I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame..."
She describes books as thresholds where the author's story "crosses the threshold from my world into yours."
"Books for me are a home...you open a book and you go inside."
"Unconditional love is what a child should expect even though it rarely works out that way. I didn't have that and I was a very nervous watchful child."
"When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love--its quality--to be unreliable."
"For most of my lie I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love--the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak that health."
"I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love."
"It is never too late to learn love. But it is frightening.
When talking about leaving home she said,"You always take it with you. It takes much longer to leave the psychi place than the physical place."
Said that in the post WWII move away from neoliberal economics, in order to rebuild societies, "It was a real advance in human consciousness towards collective responsibility; an understanding that we owed something to each other. Society. Civilisation. Culture."
"The more I read, the more I felt connected across time to other lives and deeper sympathies. I felt less isolated."
Glowing reviews abound: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Independent, The Telegraph, The Washington Post, Publishers Weekly