Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal by Jeanette Winterson

From The Week of November 12, 2012 As much as our lives, and thus our personalities, are shaped by a million unpredictable incidents, spanning decades, which are as uncontrollable as they are unavoidable, our parents define our existences. For when we are but blank slates, unformed in childhood, they are there to impart upon us codes of morality and conduct that we cannot reject. To do so would compel us to reject our parents as well and we are ill-equipped, at such an age, to be on our own. Thus, we conform. For good or ill, we learn at their feet, uplifted by their generosity, degraded by their abuse. We are encoded by them in ways we will never escape. No one knows this better than Ms. Winterson, much to her cost.

One of Britain's more famous, contemporary authors, Jeanette Winterson rose to prominence in 1985 when, at the age of 26, she published her first and to-date most successful novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. This coming-of-age tale of a young lesbian suffering the stones and arrows of her narrowminded, fundamentalist mother was as raw as it was vivid, capturing, in its two main characters, both the profound, generational divide that separates postwar parents from their Gen-X children -- repression versus freedom, authoritarianism versus individualism --, and the degrees to which these differences, born of time and circumstance, prevented anything like understanding from forming between the two disconnected groups.

At the time, Ms. Winterson acknowledged that this work was inspired by her own history. However, Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal makes clear just how much, introducing the reader to the author's tortured childhood in which her exquisitely miserable adopted mother heaped upon her atypical but talented daughter the sins and the disappointments of her own repressed existence. Obsessed with sin, the elder Winterson could not see past her disapproval to recognize that her daughter possessed an unusual love of literature and poetry, a passion that would carry her to the heights of Oxford and beyond, leaving behind the gray and narrow world in which her mother had boxed herself. From painful, childhood episodes to the search for her biological mother, Ms. Winterson recounts her life, leaping as freely through time as she does from prose to verse, forever exposing the scars of a broken relationship that will never have the chance to heal.

Why Be Happy If You Can Be Normal is a fascinating read. While it is burdened by episodes of distasteful self-indulgence, it is, in every other respect, a revealing portrayal of a damaged person's most private pains. Enchained by her mother's scorn and the secrets of her own origins, Ms. Winterson spends much of her life plagued by an abusive circuit that she cannot break. For as much as she possesses the mental powers to reason her way clear of the wounds her mother burned into her soul, she cannot teach herself how to love. For all her powers, for all her success, this is beyond her talent. It is beyond anyone's talent. For allowing oneself to be loved is something that has to be nurtured in the young, cherished until it can grow armor against life's thorns. It cannot be imposed later on. For the scar tissue has already formed. And this is far from fertile soil in which to plant the seeds of trust and tenderness.

This is a commendable autobiography. For it is as raw as Ms. Winterson's most laudatory work. It is nothing less than the expose of the frailties of one person's mind and soul. And yet, this is also its most grievous flaw. For this is almost too personal, too acute. I feel like a voyeur, like I have been witnessed to something not meant for me. Still, to the degree to which it may help those who have suffered the same or similar dignities from those they trusted most, to make them feel less alone it is worthwhile.

As honest as it is sad... (3/5 Stars)