JEANETTE Winterson was given up for adoption when she was six months old.
She spent the next 16 years living in a dormitory town near Manchester, the ward of a poor and devout older couple. These Pentecostals intended the future author should become a missionary.
But as their bookish daughter’s stubborn, rebellious nature revealed itself her mother — very much the household tyrant — distanced herself emotionally. The strap was regularly administered, secular books were forbidden and the child was often locked out of the house overnight or, worse, locked in the backyard coalhole.
Yet, as family grotesques go, Mrs Winterson was something of a gift to her adoptive daughter. Jeanette Winterson’s highly successful first novel drew its subject and its energy from her real-life person. The cloud of fire and brimstone in a housecoat and slippers who submitted her daughter to a three-day exorcism at the hands of her fellow parishioners after discovering Jeanette’s teenage affair with a female friend was, in retrospect, the progenitor of a significant literary career.=
Winterson’s new memoir, a nonfiction account of these early years that operates as a companion piece to her semi-autobiographical 1985 debut, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, acknowledges that the real Mrs Winterson was as stifling in her domestic diktats, cruel in her punishments, terrible in her withholding of affection as her novelistic double. In revisiting these awful events, in fact, the author admits that truth was worse than fiction.
This is no narrative of victimhood, however, but one of gratitude. In its lugubrious humour, its striving to find virtue in unlikely places and in its willingness to try to understand the forces that damaged her mother, Why Be Happy recalls a feminine version of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.
That Victorian-era account of an upbringing as the child of Plymouth Brethren contains hints of what it was in Winterson’s early life that made a writer of her. As V.S. Pritchett observed, revisiting the memoir during World War II:
Extreme peculiarity in a religious sect is exciting, even stimulating and enlarging to a child; it isolates him, and in doing so gives him a heady importance, an enormous lead (in some respects) over his more orthodox fellows.
But the experience is too fierce, the critic concludes. Winterson’s talent may have been sharpened on the hard whetstone of her mother’s personality, with its ecstatic religiosity, but Winterson’s inner life has remained, by her own admission, jagged and blunt. Why be Happy is the story of how the author was un-homed by the severing of relations with her mother, and of her efforts to make a home for herself in the world.
For the refugee, for the homeless, this lack of a crucial co-ordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true North. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.
Much of the memoir is given over to the ways in which words have helped Winterson repair this lack: in practical terms, through the modest financial freedom writing books has won her; but also in a psychological sense. The words of others (and contained here are some marvellous mini-essays on 17th-century prose and poetry, on 19th-century novels, on the glories of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein) remain a home that the author carries with her everywhere. Still, words can also lay waste. Winterson writes of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit’s auto-exposure:
I need words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.
And Winterson lends all the fierce poetry, intelligence and epigrammatic punch of her prose to doing so. Thrilling as the author may be in denunciation of her mother, the tale as a whole foregrounds the woman’s vulnerability; empathy keeps breaking through: “There were many fights, and about many things, but the battle between us was really the battle between happiness and unhappiness.”
The final sections of the memoir, which leap forward a quarter-century to trace Winterson’s efforts to find her birth mother, do not undermine this looming relationship so much as reinforce its centrality. Mrs Winterson was the mother she had. For better or worse, it was the battle between them that made her who she is. “I was very often full of rage and despair,” Winterson writes, looking back:
I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.
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Jeanette Winterson | Why be Happy When You Could be Normal?
JEANETTE Winterson was given up for adoption when she was six months old.
She spent the next 16 years living in a dormitory town near Manchester, the ward of a poor and devout older couple. These Pentecostals intended the future author should become a missionary.
But as their bookish daughter’s stubborn, rebellious nature revealed itself her mother — very much the household tyrant — distanced herself emotionally. The strap was regularly administered, secular books were forbidden and the child was often locked out of the house overnight or, worse, locked in the backyard coalhole.
Yet, as family grotesques go, Mrs Winterson was something of a gift to her adoptive daughter. Jeanette Winterson’s highly successful first novel drew its subject and its energy from her real-life person. The cloud of fire and brimstone in a housecoat and slippers who submitted her daughter to a three-day exorcism at the hands of her fellow parishioners after discovering Jeanette’s teenage affair with a female friend was, in retrospect, the progenitor of a significant literary career.=
Winterson’s new memoir, a nonfiction account of these early years that operates as a companion piece to her semi-autobiographical 1985 debut, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, acknowledges that the real Mrs Winterson was as stifling in her domestic diktats, cruel in her punishments, terrible in her withholding of affection as her novelistic double. In revisiting these awful events, in fact, the author admits that truth was worse than fiction.
This is no narrative of victimhood, however, but one of gratitude. In its lugubrious humour, its striving to find virtue in unlikely places and in its willingness to try to understand the forces that damaged her mother, Why Be Happy recalls a feminine version of Edmund Gosse’s Father and Son.
That Victorian-era account of an upbringing as the child of Plymouth Brethren contains hints of what it was in Winterson’s early life that made a writer of her. As V.S. Pritchett observed, revisiting the memoir during World War II:
Extreme peculiarity in a religious sect is exciting, even stimulating and enlarging to a child; it isolates him, and in doing so gives him a heady importance, an enormous lead (in some respects) over his more orthodox fellows.
But the experience is too fierce, the critic concludes. Winterson’s talent may have been sharpened on the hard whetstone of her mother’s personality, with its ecstatic religiosity, but Winterson’s inner life has remained, by her own admission, jagged and blunt. Why be Happy is the story of how the author was un-homed by the severing of relations with her mother, and of her efforts to make a home for herself in the world.
For the refugee, for the homeless, this lack of a crucial co-ordinate in the placing of the self has severe consequences. At best it must be managed, made up for in some way. At worst, a displaced person, literally, does not know which way is up, because there is no true North. No compass point. Home is much more than shelter; home is our centre of gravity.
Much of the memoir is given over to the ways in which words have helped Winterson repair this lack: in practical terms, through the modest financial freedom writing books has won her; but also in a psychological sense. The words of others (and contained here are some marvellous mini-essays on 17th-century prose and poetry, on 19th-century novels, on the glories of the King James Bible, Shakespeare and Gertrude Stein) remain a home that the author carries with her everywhere. Still, words can also lay waste. Winterson writes of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit’s auto-exposure:
I need words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.
And Winterson lends all the fierce poetry, intelligence and epigrammatic punch of her prose to doing so. Thrilling as the author may be in denunciation of her mother, the tale as a whole foregrounds the woman’s vulnerability; empathy keeps breaking through: “There were many fights, and about many things, but the battle between us was really the battle between happiness and unhappiness.”
The final sections of the memoir, which leap forward a quarter-century to trace Winterson’s efforts to find her birth mother, do not undermine this looming relationship so much as reinforce its centrality. Mrs Winterson was the mother she had. For better or worse, it was the battle between them that made her who she is. “I was very often full of rage and despair,” Winterson writes, looking back:
I was always lonely. In spite of all that I was and am in love with life.