Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette WintersonGrove Press, 2011 (Originally Jonathan Cape)

I saw Jeanette Winterson read excerpts from this book back in March, and it was satisfying to recognize certain passages&#8212like the part where she talks about how Mrs Winterson, her adopted mother, read Jane Eyre aloud but bowdlerized the ending, improvising in the style of Charlotte Brontë. Mrs Winterson figures large in this book, as she did/does in Jeantte Winterson’s life: she was depressive, abusive, Pentecostal, fond of the Apocalypse, and helped make Jeanette Winterson who she is, in ways both good and bad. To say Winterson didn’t have an easy childhood is putting it mildly, but she survived, got out, got an education that neither her working-class adoptive parents or her working-class birth parents ever had. And wrote, and writes. Winterson is hugely concerned with stories, with the shapes of stories and the power of stories, and that’s one of the great things about this book. Early in the book, she describes Mrs Winterson like this:

She filled the phone box. She was out of scale, larger than life. She was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable. She loomed up. She expanded. (3)

Fairy stories and myths (and archetypes, like the Quest Story) recur in this book, but they’re not the only kind of story. Winterson also tells the story of a place and time, of the North of England in the 1960s and 1970s, and of the history of it, too, the looms and mills. The descriptive passages about Manchester and its surrounding towns were another highlight of the book for me, with lovely sentences like this:

When I was born the looms had gone but not the long low terraces of houses sometimes stone sometimes brick under shallow-pitched roofs of slate tiles. (17)

Or passages like this:

Accrington Market was a big brash market, indoors and outdoors, with stalls stacked with dirty potatoes and fat cabbages. There were stalls selling household cleaners out of vats — no packaging, you took your own bottles for bleach and your own tubs for caustic soda. There was a stall that sold nothing but whelks and crabs and eels, and a stall that sold chocolate biscuits in paper bags. (87)

And, too, I like how much hope there is in this book, despite all the difficult times it describes. I like the hope that comes from stories and the hope that comes from experience: at one point Winterson writes about how the story of Perceval and the idea of the second chance gave her hope, then says this:

In fact, there are more than two chances — many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance. (38)