Of a Sad and Troubled Upbringing

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson's memoir is a moving book of Winterson's childhood and adolescent awakening as she discovers that she is a lesbian. "Why be happy when you could be normal?" is the real-life question of her adopted mother, as Winterson is evicted, at 16, for taking up with a second girlfriend (the attempts to exorcise her sexuality after the first having been unsuccessful).

             

Jeanette's experience of home life under the aegis of Mrs Winterson was bleak.  She was beaten, she was often hungry, she was left all night on the doorstep by a mother whose religious excesses might even have been a secondary influence on the household, the first being her depression, which was pervasive and relentless. She was not well loved. Jeanette describes Mrs Winterson, who, in between her violent homilies and dishonest violence, had like any good tyrant various crucial absurdities – "she was one of the first women to have a heated corset. Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard."  In the end the story of Jeanette's early years ends in escape.  

The writer then skips forward a quarter century, and she has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner. She finds her adoption papers in her father's effects, when he is moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide.  "In February 2008 I tried to end my life," she writes, describing an attempt at gassing herself in a sealed car before realising that her cat was trapped inside with her. "My friends never failed me and when I could talk I did talk to them. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place." She begins her journey to track down her biological mother. 

She describes the beginnings of her current relationship with the renowned psychoanalyst, Susie Orbach, with whom she thought a romance would not develop, "because Susie was heterosexual and I have given up missionary work with heterosexual women". Orbach is portrayed in tender, maternal terms as she accompanies her on the search for her biological mother. Indeed, one senses Orbach's influence in passages on abandonment and the loss of mother love.

The quest to find her mother, Ann, and their first meeting in working-class Manchester, leads to a painful acceptance of the fact that a pre-adoptive identity - and its sense of wholeness - can never be regained. In some ways, this meeting takes her back to Mrs W and the dual role that she occupied as a mother and a non-mother: "I notice that I hate Ann criticising Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster".  In the book Winterson unpicks the damage her adoptive parents wrought  on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is perhaps more significant and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.

Commentary with excepts from The Guardian and The Independent Reviews.