By Rukmini Chawla Kumar
‘Jeanette, will you tell me why?’
‘What why?’
‘You know what why…’
‘When I am with her I am happy. Just happy.’
‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’
‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’ is also the title of this stunning memoir by Jeanette Winterson, author of seventeen previous books including ten novels. Her writing has won several awards, and in 2002, she was awarded the OBE for her services to literature. Now that you have the basic idea that this is a writer who matters, let me take you into her memoir.
The conversation above is one that sixteen-year-old Jeanette Winterson had with her adopted mother {whom she calls Mrs Winterson}. At the end of this conversation, Jeanette walked out of her parents’ home because she chose happiness. You may put this down to adolescent histrionics. On the other hand, if you have read even the first page of this book, you will know that there was nothing ‘normal’ in Winterson’s childhood and adolescence. This is how the book starts: “When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.’”
Mrs Winterson was a woman who baked cakes all night to avoid sleeping in the same bed with her husband; she kept a revolver in the duster drawer and bullets in a tin; she strongly believed in God – God of the Old Testament, wrathful and vengeful. Her favourite ways to punish her daughter were to lock her outside the house for the night or lock her into the coal-hole. And so, mother and daughter lived together in a dark space where Mrs Winterson “… didn’t believe that anything would make life better.” Winterson says, “We were matched in our lost and losing. I had lost the warm safe place, however chaotic, of the first person I loved. I had lost my name and identify. Adopted children are dislodged. My mother felt that the whole of life was a grand dislodgement.”
Wait. Before you conclude that this is a “heavy” book and you shouldn’t be reading it, let me tell you that it is very inspiring, and actually yields an intense and quiet joy. This woman could have easily given up on life, given the fact that she landed up in the wrong crib! But Winterson takes life on the chin, and learns to survive, even as a child, with wit, oodles of courage and the incredible ability to think and feel beyond the confines of a cruel and claustrophobic life with her Pentecostal parents. Despite such a life, Winterson does not let things get depressing because she never pities herself; she tells it like it is and she tells it with humour. The result is that she makes you wince {or worse} at the same time as she makes you want to grin. And because you are suddenly aware of the contradiction within yourself, you find you have to re-read a certain sentence to explore shades of meaning.
Right after Winterson writes about being born in the wrong crib, she remarks, “The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 – purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson – has a flamboyant theatricality to it …” On another occasion, referring to the extreme Pentecostal mindset of her mother, she says, “Most kids grow up leaving something out for Santa at Christmas time when he comes down the chimney. I used to make presents for the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.” Another reason for wanting to savour Winterson’s sentences is that this memoir comes from immense depths and a deep intelligence, and every word she writes has meaning.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough story; a space where Winterson struggles to find the meaning of home and identity, to find love and to find herself. It is also the story of “a life’s work to find happiness.” But happiness for her is not a thoughtless or superficial place: “Pursuing happiness…is not at all the same as being happy – which I think is fleeting, dependent on the circumstances, and a bit bovine…The pursuit of happiness is more elusive…what you are pursuing is meaning – a meaningful life.”
The author first found meaning when she stumbled upon Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the house {there were only six books allowed in her house; five of these were the Bible and other such books}. “The stories of Arthur, of Lancelot and Guinevere, of Merlin, of Camelot and the Grail, docked into me like the missing molecule of a chemical compound…the Perceval story gave me hope. There might be a second chance…In fact…the whole of life is about chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance.”
This memoir is also, therefore, a tribute to books and to the creative – and healing – power of reading and writing. Books were Winterson’s bridge to sanity: “My mother didn’t want books falling into my hands. It never occurred to her that I fell into the books – that I put myself inside them for safe keeping.” Fiction and poetry, stuff that her mother absolutely forbade, were, for her, “medicines,” and “what they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged and a very important part of me destroyed – that was my reality, the facts of my life; but on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel, and as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn’t lost.” Reading T.S. Eliot’s poetry made her see that “a tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn’t a hiding place. It’s a finding place.”
But one day, even her books were taken away from her, when her mother found them hidden in Winterson’s room: she destroyed them. Winterson learnt a valuable lesson. She says, “… whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.” So she began to memorise what she read: “I had lines inside me. A string of guiding lights.” This incident taught her something else as well. Staring at the smouldering pile of books, she thought, “Fuck it … I can write on my own.” Elsewhere, she says, “There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt…it’s why I’m a writer…To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own.”
Upon quitting home, Winterson lived in her Mini {‘The only way to sleep in a car is to have a plan’}, loved her girlfriend Janey and did odd jobs to keep body and soul together. After a hard struggle, she got though to Oxford University. The years that followed were challenging. She also began her writing career. But the trauma of being Mrs Winterson’s adopted daughter caught up with her eventually. The second half of the book focuses on Winterson’s battle with madness {that culminates in a suicide attempt} and her heartbreaking search and eventual reunion with her real mother. And, one day, she gets a letter from her birth mother who tells her something she could have never imagined, but the absence of which has defined her entire life: “You were always wanted.”
At the start of the last chapter, Winterson writes, “When I began this book I had no idea how it would turn out. I was writing in real time. I was writing the past and discovering the future.” She offers no soothing resolution at the end of the book, and I don’t believe she is meant to. She ends by saying, “Love. The difficult word. Where everything starts, where we always return. Love. Love’s lack. The possibility of love. I have no idea what happens next.”
Life. A work in progress.
About the Author | Rukmini loves the written word. So, she writes, and is also the author of ‘Apostle of Love, A life of Mother Teresa,’ published by Penguin books. An editor by profession, Rukmini finds books exceedingly ‘happy making’. She also moderates the Little Black Book Delhi Book Club.
