Customer Reviews

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

5 star:		(132)
4 star:		(39)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(9)
1 star:		(6)

 

 

An excellent read, as an adoptee, I found it riveting and drew many parallels with my own 'adoption experience'. I truly admire Ms Wintersons' candid style and honest revelations about herself and her life. She has, with her brilliance as a wordsmith, described so eloquently the complexity of feelings and emotional turmoil that are part and parcel of adoption.

I don't love Winterson's work in general but I did love this. It's laugh-out-loud funny at times but also raw and intensely moving. There are times when as a reader you feel like you are intruding on a private world. It's also a very intelligent book that moves swiftly and engagingly from personal experience to mythology to politics. I think book clubs will enjoy talking about it.

I can highly recommend Jeanette Winterson's autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal. This book is literary in nature and full of pain. In fact it brought me to tears. Winterson's voice is so clear I could almost hear her speaking. I loved it and I have to confess I wasn't a fan. I enjoyed Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit but to be honest I thought her pretentious. The book does much to explain why that is. She escaped her horrendous childhood through reading and through that same literature she carved out an identity and a place in the world. In telling her story she uses literature to show and to conceal herself. I urge you to read it

I'd always thought of Jeanette Winterson as a clever writer and an original thinker, but I found some of her books difficult to relate to. In this book however, she seems really warm and likeable as well as strong and courageous. The book is funny and moves along at a great pace. I hated reading about her "exorcism" and later mental illness, because it felt by then as if I was reading about a friend. I am watching "Oranges are not the only fruit" again and it is disturbing to watch.
Mrs Winterson is certainly a complex character, and not all bad. She clearly put thought and effort into bringing up her adopted daughter, for example putting biblical quotations into her school bag, but how sad that she couldn't show affection or share a sense of fun with her. She is not painted as a villain in the book, but rather as an enormous presence, fascinating and frustrating, unhappy but determined. Was it she I wonder who took the cover photographs? Excellent choices. An excellent book.

I read this book first as a library book i had requested but just had to buy it, as i know i will read it again many times.
Winterson is a brilliant writer and very easy to read here.
There are resonances in this book for everyone, regardless of gender or sexuality. I especially remember reading something along the lines of 'thoughts have feelings' which really struck a chord with me.
I must re-read that part again soon.
Many of us have less than perfect childhoods yet perhaps few as cruel as the one portrayed. For all that Winterson is clearly a survivor, i thank her for writing what must have been at times a very painful account of her younger life. Long may she continue and i look forward to reading about the 'missing' years if she ever feels ready to write about them.
Needless to say i would recommend this book to everyone. In fact it should be on a syllabus to be studied at school if only to illustrate that there's no such thing as 'normal'.

Jeanette Winterson is one of our best writers and this insight into her life is truly remarkable. I wanted to read more and more.

Her unusual upbringing is part of the experiences that have shaped her into the exceptional writer she is today.

I loved this book and highly recommend it to others.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?Fascinating, absorbing and honest account of one of my favourite writers. Would highly recommend this book as an eye-opening insight into the lives of others. Things are not always as they appear to be from the outside!

I so love this book,it is up there with my favourites, So well written,concise,fast paced and without a shred of self pity.Jeanettes story is mostly known through"Oranges",and this memoir compliments it perfectly,but life was far harsher in reality.Anyone who has been adopted and knows what it feels like to have that psychic shock of being wrenched away from "the womb" of the mother will relate to how this separates you from family life for the remainder of your life.Top this with a freaky God fearing controlling adoptive parent who appears to hate you and shuts you out on the doorstep all night.It is a miracle that the child survives to become an independant gifted writer.Through breakdowns and self will she pulls through.Dont miss it.

I hadn't read a JW book in a while... After reading the extract in The Guardian and listening to her read the 5 parts on Radio 4 it was an obvious birthday present to myself. It is intelligent, witty, dark, full of life and very funny. It is a great story and it lights up a day.

Winterson is a great story teller--and this is the story of her talent, forged through her Bible-oriented pentecostal upbringing, honed in Accrington libraries and then at Oxford. The cast of support characters, led by her adoptive mother, are vividly drawn--funny, bizarre and generally one-dimensional, but that's the strength of Winterson's narrative of a child's experience of a culture where religious dogma is never explained, just brutally inscribed. Good and evil are personified in charicatural but often entertaining figures, whose motives are rarely fleshed out. This does not impair the often gut-wrenching impact of the memoir but does jar a little with the sometimes trite philosophising (the weak point of the text). Winterson is quick to judgement, her moralising and literary theorising no doubt influenced by the certainty with which her mother's pious homilies were delivered. The 1611 Bible, she pronounces, made working class oral cultures wonderfully eloquent, providing a natural segue into the canons of Elizabethan literature. Liberal-minded reformers totally missed this in their wrongheaded instance on the contemporary vernacular. Like many of Winterson's views, this provocation contains a grain of truth; a truth that relates to the story of an unusually talented bookish girl whose Bible study led her to a writing career. But it disregards the broader base of experience (the non-literate majority who never made it to the library or school, let alone Oxford). Winterson has a brusque, individual, conservative streak and tellingly confesses to voting for Margaret Thatcher in 1979; it's engaging, touching and witty, when exposed in the drama of the memoir, less convincing when it becomes the basis of a polemic. Still, this is powerful testimony to the value of literature and a lovely account of how writing comes into being. Definitely worth reading for inspiration and entertainment.