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

For me, the average was five miles a day: two miles for the round trip to school three miles for the round trip to church. If I was locked out overnight I sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school. I was beaten as a child and I learned early never to cry.

The one who wins is the one who hits the hardest. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.’įor most of my life I’ve been a bare-knuckle fighter. The novel begins: ‘ Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. The mother has a handle – she’s called ‘Kindly Light’. The girl leaves home, gets herself to Oxford University, returns home to find her mother has built a broadcast radio and is beaming out the Gospel to the heathen. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. It is semiautobiographical, in that it tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. She was alive when my first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published in 1985. We do that for our parents – we don’t really have any choice. She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world – a way of saying that she was here – a kind of X Marks the Spot. I do not know why she didn’t/couldn’t have children. A woman with a prolapse, a thyroid condition, an enlarged heart, an ulcerated leg that never healed, and two sets of false teeth – matt for everyday, and a pearlised set for ‘best’. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. She was a flamboyant depressive a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. 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. When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’

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