When Winterson Flinches

It is hard to make the distinction between Winterson as a person and Winterson as a character in Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal. She repeats that her literary persona is in Oranges, and in fact readers are getting the real her in this memoir. But there are times when I think Winterson flinches, when she doesn't give us the whole story, even though at times she is very frank about her mental health and romantic relationships.

I think a lot goes unsaid about her adoptive mother. Yes, the first half is practically all about her mother and her mother's inability to allow her daughter or husband to be happy. Winterson does such a great job at depicting her life with her mother in early childhood that I was confused when she ignores huge chunks of her life with her mother. Yes, there is a good decade where neither of them speak to each other, but Winterson talks little about how this separation affected her, and she does very little imagining what the separation was like for her mother. I just felt like I was dealing with two different memoirs that really didn't add up, and after finishing the book I still feel like Winterson is hiding a lot from me.

Winterson's dialogue on pg. 210 is telling about her relationship with emotion, and her fear of her own emotions runs throughout the memoir. She writes, "When I stood up to speak about Dad, I said, 'The things that I regret in my life are not errors of judgement but failures of feelings." And I think Winterson fails at conveying her feelings throughout this book; whether it's deliberate, I'm not too sure. Yes, she is a very talented writer, but I also got the sense that she was protecting herself while looking back while writing. A good example of this comes on pg. 43 when she is looking at her burning books and enduring another one of her mother's crazy outbursts: "And standing over the smouldering pile of paper and type, still warm the next cold morning, I understood there was something else I could do. 'Fuck it,' I thought, 'I can write my own.'" And that is all Winterson says about it for pages and pages. So many traumatic events happen in this memoir, and she relays them in a very detached manner. It takes until pg. 60 for readers to get a glimpse of Jeanette's inner emotions: "The horrible sick feeling that I had never belonged and never would belong is assuaged now by the fact that my homes are mine and I can come and go as I please." Maybe it's just the type of reader I am, or the fact that I'm also reading Jamaica Kincaid's My Brother (a memoir about Kincaid watching her brother die of AIDS and her matter of fact approach to her emotional turmoil over his death), but I keep sensing Winterson back away from her emotion when she addresses her relationship with her mother. (Interestingly, she doesn't flinch when she talks about the decline of her mental health and her attempted suicide.)

Oh, and a great moment that happens when she does address her emotion is on pg. 110: "I felt cold inside. I felt nothing inside. I could have killed him. I would have killed him. I would have killed him and felt nothing." There is a lot happening below the surface, a lot of pain and anger and violence; I just would have liked to see more of it come through.

I also think Winterson flinches when writing about her father. She is really not kind to her mother, and though she does spend some time trying to imagine why her mother was the way she was, she is actually very forgiving to her father. This rubbed me the wrong way. Her father was just as accountable for the abuse as her mother because he stood by and let his wife abuse his daughter. Despite this, we still get loads of sad facts about his childhood and his time during war: how he fell asleep in the doorway of the bar as his father drank and then forgot about him. How he wasn't even given bullets during D-Day but had to stab his way to safety. Winterson's mother probably had very traumatic moments in her life to make her the way she was, but Winterson doesn't spend much time trying to figure it out. Yes, we get details about Mrs. W nursing her dying mother, and later on we get hints that maybe she feared sex because she was a lesbian? (This is meant to be funny, but I really wanted Winterson to explore this: Why did her mother fear sex? Why couldn't her mother sleep for days? What kind of trauma occurred in her mother's life?) My favorite moments in the book are when Winterson does take the time to think about her mother's inner world, like on pg. 3: "Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her." I love this line, but it makes me wonder: When did Winterson discover this? There's no point later in the book where Winterson comes to an understanding about her mother, when she discovers something that truly revealed her mother in some new light.

I'm focused on this because I really thought Winterson would see her mother with more empathy after she has her own battle with mental illness. For pages she describes her crippling fear and desire for death . . . but still she doesn't bring her battle back to her mother, the emotional center of the first half of the book. The first half: her mother; second half: her own battle with depression. Winterson repeats that her mother wanted to die, but she rarely pauses to reflect on the similarities between she and her mother. (Yes, they aren't related by blood, but I do think in a lot of ways our parents teach us how to deal with emotion.) One of the few times Winterson does make the connection is on pg. 207: "We were laughing about Mrs Winterson and how monstrous and impossible she was, but how absolutely right for someone like me, who, like her, could have accepted a scaled-down life. She turned inwards; I turned outwards."  But Winterson also turned inward during her battle with depression . . .  I just think Winterson is hiding a lot in Why Be Happy and it was very distracting when reading because I was so emotionally invested in her character and her character's mother.