Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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 and 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 and inspire an award-winning BBC television adaptation. Oranges was semi-autobiographical. Mrs Winterson a thwarted giantess loomed over that novel and 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 and 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; and about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. It is the story of how the painful past Jeanette Winterson thought she had written over and repainted returned to haunt her later life and sent her on a journey into madness and out again in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other peoples stories showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights a life-raft which supports us when we are sinking. Funny acute fierce and celebratory this is a tough-minded search for belonging for love an identity a home and a mother.