I saw the advertising of this memoir at the tube station; a familiar face in a body of a child (around 5 or 6?) holding a beach ball with swimming suit too small. The child in the picture is smiling but her smile seems somewhat forced, as if she is smiling and crying at the same time. I was drawn to the picture, and as I realised that it was Jeanette Winterson, I was intrigued. On top of that, how could anyone resist the title, "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?"
Winterson is known as a prolific writer, but also as someone who has no inhibition declaring that she is a lesbian. Naturally, I imagined what she meant by "Happy" and "Normal" are associated with her sexuality, but this was not so. This book is about how she became who she is, and what she would have been if she was not raised the way she was raised.
Her debut novel, "Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit" was mostly drawn from her real-life story, but according to her memoir, the reality was harsher than she wrote in her novel. She was raised by a hand-to-mouth working class family outside Manchester by disturbed and neurotic adopted mother and father who was overwhelmed by this overpowering woman. Re-living her account through her memoir is like living through nightmare. An adoptive mother who thinks the world is her enemy saturated with devils, who never sleeps, who is didactic, and whose mood swings from one end to the other with the smallest provocation. The only escape route for Jeanette was the imaginative world of books and library.
Her writings are angry, because she pours and relieves her emotions into them, and she seems to know how to live with her emotion because she has found her outlet. However, she never overcame one thing, that is, to receive love and accept love as it is, just as her lover states in the book; 'Most women can give - we're trained to it - but most women find it hard to receive. You are generous and you are kind - I wouldn't want to be with you otherwise, no matter how brainy and impressive you are - but our conflicts and our difficultes revolve around love. You don't trust me to love you, do you?'
To this, she writes: 'No...I am the wrong crib...this will go wrong like all the rest. In my heart of hearts I believe that. The love-work that I have to do now is to believe that life will be all right for me. I don't have to be alone. I don't have to fight for everything. I don't have to fight everything. I don't have to run away. I can stay because this is love that is offered, a sane steady stable love.'
So this memoir is a journey of her search for love; her adopted mother may or may not have loved her, but it was never verifiable. If there was love, it was an elusive one, the one that tiniest provocation sent her out of the house, no matter how small she may have been. Her adopted father may have loved her, but he was very much in the same boat as his adopted daughter when her adopted mother was around. When Winterson finally found her birth mother who wrote to her, "You were always wanted", I cried my eyes off, because I know that these 4 words meant the world to the writer.
There is no happy ending here. Winterson found that she wasn't unwanted at one point in her life, but the fact that she lived the life she has lived cannot be edited out. The only difference is that she knows that someone wanted her, and that someone wanted her whether it is requited or not.
What I realised reading this book is that I am very similar to her when it comes to being unable to accept love. Unlike Winterson, I was raised by my birth parents, and I know that they wanted me, but that does not mean I have been able to accept what they offered.
This entry is full of quotes, but I need to quote one section that hits me like a bullet:
'But I did not know how to love. If I could have faced that simple fact about myself, and the likelihood that someone with my story (my stories, both real and invented) would have big problems with love, then, then, what?
Listen, we are human beings. Listen, we are inclined to love. Love is there, but we need to be taught how. We want to stand upright, we want to walk, but someone needs to hold our hand and balance us a bit, and guide us a bit, and scoop us up when we fall.
Listen, we fall. Love is there but we have to learn it - and its shapes and its possibilities. I taught myself to stand on my own two feet, but I could not teach myself how to love.
We have a capcity for language. We have a capacity for love. We need other people to release those capacities.'
http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/content/index.asp?PageID=611
