Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Product Description

In 1985 Jeanette Wintersons first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" was published. It tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up & be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. Written when Jeanette was only twenty-five her novel went on to win the Whitbread First Novel award become an international bestseller & inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation. " Oranges" was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson a thwarted giantess loomed over that novel & its authors life. When Jeanette finally left her home at sixteen because she was in love with a woman Mrs Winterson asked her: why be happy when you could be normal? This book is the story of a lifes work to find happiness. It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home sitting on the doorstep all night; about a tyrant in place of a mother who has two sets of false teeth & a revolver in the duster drawer waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an northern industrial town now changed beyond recognition part of a community now vanished; & about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over & repainted returned to haunt her later life & sent her on a journey into madness & out again in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other peoples stories showing how fiction & poetry can form a string of guiding lights a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking. Funny acute fierce & celebratory this is a tough-minded search for belonging for love an identity a home & a mother."