A Book I Love
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson
I'm never sure how to write about a book I love. Sometimes I write lists of books I've found wonderful or useful. Occasionally, I've written about unfamiliar words - to me at least - from something I've read. This book is different though. It's a book I've read a few times and always find something new and meaningful.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is, I think, a story about the search for love. And acceptance. Winterson was adopted as a baby into a family of two, Mr and Mrs Winterson a couple with no children, who, by all accounts, were ill-equipped to look after any child, especially a child that needed the attentive care the baby Jeanette needed.
As a young person, like most young people, Jeanette looked for love.
"I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn't work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love — both the giving and receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value.
I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you?
I had no idea.
I thought that love was loss."
p78
Winterson takes us on a journey in beautiful, inciteful prose, through how it was trying to navigate the treacherous waters of a fundamental religious upbringing with the thoughts and feelings of one who observes and questions and fights. We're taken by the hand, learning about Mrs Winterson, the monstrous mother who locks her daughter in the coal hole or outside of the house on particularly cold nights, when she can't cope with the emotional drama of a feisty teenager. In all of this difficulty, Winterson finds hope and beauty in literature.
I write a note in the margin of the following excerpt which says simply, I love this.
"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."
p.40
This cruel act of punishment, this act of being locked out of the house, spending hours and hours sitting on the doorstep, waiting to be let in has impacted Winterson’s life to this day.
"All those hours spent sitting on my bum on the doorstep have given me a feeling for liminal space. I love the way cats like to be half in half out, the wild and the tame, and I too am the wild and the tame. I am domestic, but only if the door is open.
And I guess that is the key — no one is ever going to lock me in or lock me out again. My door is open and I am the one who opens it."
p.60
We have a cat, a large tabby cat who was born in the kitchen of the house we lived in before we moved to Canada. He likes to sit looking out of the window. Sometimes we open the door for him. Sometimes he ventures outside. Sometimes he stays inside.
Our neighbours told us, when we first moved here, that a hawk preys on the cats in the neighbourhood.
Today, as we drive back from getting a lunchtime sandwich, I see a huge bald eagle circling high above our house.
I point it out to my husband.
"I hope Tabby's inside," he says.
Towards the end of the book, Winterson sets out to find her biological mother. It's a heart-wrenching read which, for some reason, I forget about every time. She explains to us that before 1976 adoptions were made as closed records. Meaning that mothers and children were both afforded a lifetime of anonymity. Later, the law changed and children could begin the process of looking for their mother, for their beginning.
Winterson is assigned a social worker who she describes as warm and spontaneous.
"She talks for a while about data protection, and about the various UK Adoption Acts, and about the usual routes of contact. If I want to go further there were formalities. there always are.
She looks at my pieces of paper — the court order and the Baby MOT — and she notices that my mother had breastfed me.
'That was the one thing she could give you. She gave you what she could. She didn't have to do that and it would have been a lot easier for her if she hadn't. It is such a bond — breastfeeding. When she gave you up at six weeks old you were still a part of her body.'"
p.184
I think about this. I breastfed my two babies. I remember the struggle of it. Breast is Best! the mid-wives told all us — all of us new mothers. So I did what I could, my body making miraculous milk for every feed.
When I stopped, when my daughters were a few months old, I cried. I'm not sure I really knew why. People talked about how that was normal — Your hormones are all over the place, they said. Something I’ve noticed is often said to women in times of emotional struggle.
But now I know.
I know I cried because my babies were still a part of my body.
