Book review: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

AT LAST – an essential new book by Jeanette Winterson. She is a natural memoirist. The first half is a mature retelling of her masterwork, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the story of her upbringing as the adopted daughter of Accrington’s most committed Pentecostal Christian, the fearsome Mrs Winterson, also known as Kindly Light.

The second half is a wry, urgent account of her hunt for her birth mother. Their eventual reunion is revealed at the very end of the book like a denouement in a crime story, except happy. Pressed on by the need for self-discovery, the prose doesn’t miss a beat. No crushing mythopoetics this time; no fancy parables. There are pithy asides, miniature essays about books and politics, but mainly there are two looming influences, one domineering, one absent; one with only a surname, one with only a first name: this is a tale of two mothers.

It is a pleasure to re-encounter the eschatologically minded Mrs Winterson, nightmare mother but powerful muse, forever answering the door with an irritable “Jesus is here. Go away!”

A huge figure, 20 stone in weight, wearing face powder (“keep yourself nice”) but not lipstick (“fast and loose”), she schooled young Jeanette in Apocalypse drill (“under the stairs till the angels come”) and told her the universe was a cosmic dustbin with the lid on. She is observed stirring custard “obsessively, like someone mixing the dark waters of the deep”.

Some passages are lifted from Oranges; others are new. It’s like a director’s cut with added extras and commentary. Her childhood wasn’t as bad as Oranges made out – it was worse. Softer, kinder characters such as “Testifying Elsie” were wishful thinking.

Lovers of Oranges will be relieved to learn that Mrs W really did change the ending of Jane Eyre when reading it aloud to Jeanette, extemporising a new version in which Jane becomes a missionary. She also really did see “the flash-dash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm”.

Other truths are darker than the novelisation allowed. Mrs W let Jeanette have her girlfriend over to stay, and then crept up on them at night with a flashlight to prove “unnatural passions”. A church elder tried to kiss Jeanette “correctively” ; she bit his tongue.

To Winterson, stories are “deep-dived” by writers plumbing their experience. She is saved from suicide by her cat in a paragraph of miraculous concision. She struggles through the cruelly bureaucratic process of tracing a parent, supported by her new girlfriend, whose identity she reveals thus: “I was lucky, though, because I had fallen in love with Susie Orbach.”

Having a psychiatrist at home has clearly helped. Winterson is frank about her own oddness, her perceived arrogance: “… for a woman, and a working-class woman, to want to be a good writer, and to believe that you were good enough, that was not arrogance; that was politics.”

Mrs W was ashamed of her daughter’s achievement. “It’s the first time I’ve had to order a book under a false name,” she fumed.

There is a wonderfully cathartic moment when the Other Mother, Ann, says she ordered Oranges from the library, telling the librarian proudly, “Jeanette Winterson’s my daughter”. The symmetry is unforced, the healing gradual. The new mother is a light, small presence. A chapter ends, poignantly, on her text message to Jeanette after their first meeting: “I hope you weren’t disappointed.”

If the first half of the book has been polished by retelling, the second half is raw, immediate. “I have no idea how this ends” are the book’s closing words, more a surrender than a completion. Like Winterson’s blog, it feels risky and alive. “When I began this book I had no idea how it would turn out. I was writing in real time.”

Gone is the Nabokovian memoir in which the exquisite past is presented under glass, skewered by a pin. This is the age of instant communication, of forthright, unmediated responses. Winterson has her finger to the wind.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

By Jeanette Winterson. Jonathan Cape, 240pp, £14.99