Winterson Response

Jeanette Winterson’s memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? was interesting, even fascinating in the way she used language and dialogue, as well as incorporating the themes of identity, home, love, and religion. Winterson slides between forms, and her openness about her childhood shows that she has accepted the dynamics between her and her mother.

Even in the opening pages the author displays her struggle with her mother by saying that she, “was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father” (1). This already alludes to the fact that her parents had a complicated relationship. And the father fails to protect himself and his daughter from his wife and her hysteria and outbursts. I wish she had included more on the father, because the lime-light is mostly shown on the mother. She refers to her twice in the book to be "flamboyant depressive" which is a strange way of saying that.

It is also interesting to note the switch from the narrator of Oranges and the narration of the memoir itself. Is she trying to confuse the reader on purpose? Does she want the reader to believe she is the same narrator/protagonist from her book of fiction? I'd like to read it and find out...Jeanette seems to be fragmented at times, and it is written in a style that is cryptic and also lucid. Some parts were frustrating to me, but the second part of the book was easier to latch onto and enjoy.

The theme of devout religion is also shown through the mother’s strictness. This is seen in chapter four when Winterson states, “Ours was not a secular house, and my mother was determined that I should have no secular influences” (33). This shows the reader that right away the mother has control with at least, religion on Jeanette’s life growing up. The fact that she was adopted plays into this role of questioning her mother and her crazy tactics. There is a theme of religion, and it plays out as a sort of background that conflicts with the mother’s “orbiting depression” that seems to follow her wherever she goes. Winterson seems to wring humor from adversity, and manages to go forwards, even with the intense force of her mother and her authoritarian religious upbringing.

She bravely encounters many obstacles in her life, but somehow battles through it with grace. By growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition, she learns how to deal with her religious zealot mother, which shows her tenacity and resolve. This story lays out a painful past, but in the end is only a search for the truth of where she truly belongs.