Brutal Honestly, Setting and advice Jannette Winterson

            The brutal, ugly, depressing, beautiful, horrific, “truth” of Janette Winterson’s life is in full display in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? I have never read anything like it and it starts from the very beginning. Let lets the reader know that she isn’t going to hold anything back for the sake of anyone.  In the opening paragraph she says, “When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib’” (1). Talk about a line that sets up the reader for what is about to happen. This line is harsh and so impacted, it foreshadows and it prepares us for what is to come. It is harsh, no love lost in this line and we know it is going to be a rough read. And she doesn’t disappoint, not only with the mother’s flaws and ugly truth, but with her own.

            I was once told in a workshop that there was no love for my bother coming through in my piece. I wondered why their needed to be because I didn’t feel any for him at the time I was writing. I think my piece would have been different. She writes about her adopted mother the way I was missing with my brother. Through a lens of detachment, and feeling.

Winterson  is able to round out her mother’s character by showing the times when she would be ruthless such the seen when Winterson goes home from Christmas, “She opened the front door and shouted, ‘Jesus is here. Go away.’ ‘That was a bit harsh, mum.’ ‘I have a lot to put up with,’ she said looking meaningfully at me’ I know the Bible tells us to turn the other cheek but there are only so many cheeks in a day.’”  (150).

            Winterson is also able to show compassion in a subtle way that creates a rounded character in the mother, “Mrs Winterson did not have a soothing personality. Ask for reassurance and it would never come. I never asked her if she loved me. She love me on those days when she was able to love. I really believe that is the best she could do.” (76). This sympathy is later echoed later in the story when she finds her birth mother and says, “I notice that I hate Ann criticizing Mrs Winterson. She was a monster but she was my monster.” The ability of Winterson to find the humanity in a person who caused her so much pain is overwhelming beautiful.

            Winterson is a master of setting. Of setting the tone of each chapter and placing us in all the categories we talked about in class.  We really get a sense of the feel of all elements of her life from cultural and social to the economics and education, and of course the geography and spiritual elements. Its inevery chapter. We know the economics of the family (bathroom outside, no meat most days). We know the social aspects of their town but also their house, her father defers to her mother, but her mother says he is the “man of the house.” We know about the spiritual aspects, there is a whole chapter, but it is litter throughout the novel. We know the geography and of the house, of Accrington and it is portrayed so vividly that we can see the people in the market place and we can see 200 Water street.

            This piece also works as a simi how to be a writer. The breaking of the forth wall and slipping into the second person didn’t take me out of narrative but pulled me closer to it. She is giving herself premision to write this as she is writing it and there for not only giving us permission to read it but to write our own, “I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.”

Best,

CF