That Says It...

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

I like digressions, particularly literary digressions. This is an autobiographical memoir that is filled with digressions, there is no straightforward and progressive life plotted story of Miss Winterson's birth, adoption, and abusive childhood with her adoptive parents.

Charles Dickens begins David Copperfield with:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whetherthat station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I wasborn (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelveo'clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike,and I began to cry, simultaneously.

Miss Winterson begins her memoir with:

When my Morther was angry with me, which was often, she said, 'The Devil led us to the wrong crib.'

This memoir also reminds me of Jane Eyre who grew up in an abusive home until she was taken away by an ill meaning Preacher to an All Girl Charity School in the north of England to be even more abused in the name of charity.

Miss Winterson is not unaware of the comparison, she tells a story about her adoptive mother, whom she calls Mrs. Winterson, reading Jane Eyre to her as a child. In Mrs. Winterson's version of Jane Eyre, Jane does not re-unit with Rochester, but marries St. John Rivers and goes to India to be a missionary and die in the glory and service of God. Until Miss Winterson charted her own education by starting at "A" in the local library (and thank goodness to the Alphabet Goddess for giving Jane Austin her last name), she discovered that Mrs. Winterson had made up that part of the novel, but had done it so well in Charlotte Brönte's authorial voice and manner, that it was undetectable to a young child who was accustomed to detecting her mother's deceits.

Miss Winterson was born in the North of England near the decayed and crumbled glory of  Manchester. The novel's digressions describe the region in the 1960s and 1970s very graphically. She was adopted by a couple who clung to their Penecostal Christian religion because they had no social or familial supports. Mrs. Winterson was mentally ill, but that illness was overlooked by the adoptive agency because of the cover of her religion. That is something to consider when dealing with adoptive agencies. Religion can hide all sorts of disqualifications for state sanctioned parenthood. So much for the separation of church and state.

In her later years after the death of Mrs. Winterson, Miss Winterson found her birth mother and her family and formed a tenuous bond with them, her birth mother called Mrs. Winterson "a monster" when she heard the stories of Mrs. Winterson's behavior toward her daughter. Miss Winterson retorted, "But she was My Monster."

Miss Winterson is more forgiving of her Monster in these days because she attributes her abusive upbringing to making her a writer and the only person with education in either her adoptive family or birth family. Miss Winterson can not see herself as a person who does not write or read. She does briefly imagine herself as the child who was not given away and adopted, and the image of a successful real estate lady in the north of England frightens her with its barrenness and lack of reflection. There would be no novels or this memoir in that life.

The title of the book comes from what Mrs. Winterson said to her adoptive daughter, who was the burden of the devil, when Miss Winterson told her that she was gay. The irony is that Mrs. Winterson thought that she was normal and wrapped in Jesus.