Jeanette Winterson, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011)
Imagine a world in which only strangers were allowed to speak at your funeral. The person I would choose is Jeanette Winterson (born 1959). This is not just because I know my friends would enjoy her glorious accent, one which swings off final consonants like an acrobat. Reading an audio book of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? she seems alive to every syllable she writes, even the painful ones which others might be tempted to skate over. She uses many short sentences but they drill deep. Yet the real reason I would choose Winterson as my stranger-eulogist is the generosity she brings to describing even those people who have hurt her. She takes risks just to understand. I salute that from the hiding place to which I often retreat, that of judgement.
Winterson and I would seem to have little in common. She is from the industrial north of England, was adopted as a baby, and was brought up in a strange and loveless environment. She is a lesbian. I encountered her when I was aspiring to become a priest and read her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), which, based on personal experience, describes her journey to extricate herself from the clutches of a deadly and sex-denying religion. Parts of it have a tender and lyrical eroticism. Every corner of my soul was barracking for her because she was on a journey to freedom and I hoped I might be on a similar journey, however different our two paths may have looked.
My reading life has often been enlivened by writers whose world is remote from mine. In the 1980s, I spent a few days in a slum in central Java staying with the then venerable priest and novelist Romo Mangunwijaya. I was homesick for the sweet-smelling suburbs of home. Romo Mangun showed me around the squatter settlement that was his home and explained how people buried anything they had which might be of value. Normally this would mean pictures and small statues, perhaps some documents. When the authorities came through and bulldozed the settlement, a pointless activity that happened every couple of months, people could return after the carnage and salvage their few precious items. On these occasions, he would bury his Bible and rosary beads as well as the manuscript of his work in progress. He was part of his community, not superior to it. This meant sharing the tough times.
He told me in faltering English that there was no such thing as a truth which left things the way they were. Truth is something we all grow into. I wrote those words on a card and buried them near his house, hoping one day I might return. I have done so many times, at least in my imagination. Romo Mangun was a trained architect who had chosen to spend his life with the homeless. He was comfortable with paradox.
I felt a similar connection with the writer, musician and radio presenter Eddie Ayres. We got in touch when he was still Emma Ayres, because we had enjoyed books that each other had written. Emma Ayres’ Cadence is a delightful travelogue by a viola-playing lesbian, covered in tattoos, who rode a pushbike from London to Hong Kong, sharing music with some of the least harmonious parts of the world. My Things You Get for Free is a more timid travelogue by a person covered in godly confusion. We met in a coffee shop and talked for ages. I felt an instant connection. This was probably aided by the fact that I often heard her voice on morning classical radio and that she had a habit of choosing music that helped my son, who was in the car with me, get to school at a time in his life when that felt to him like a bike ride from one continent to another.
Later, Eddie wrote a book about transitioning from being a woman into a man, Danger Music, set in the context of teaching music in Afghanistan. I struggled with Eddie’s story, possibly because I have had enough problems becoming a man myself. I continue to struggle with people changing gender, but accept that it might not be as great a change as using music to turn a stony culture into one of flesh. Eddie Ayres has helped me a lot, because I cannot doubt his honesty and his preparedness to pay a price for living out that honesty. He found a truth that changed him. That can be scary for others to witness. He could have chosen a far easier path.
So it is with countless writers who have rattled my orthodoxies.
So it is with Jeanette Winterson.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is riotous; its darkest moments are as funny as a fart at a funeral. Wacky as it may seem, the title is a verbatim quote from the woman who adopted Jeanette as a baby and who is invariably known in the book as Mrs Winterson. She is the kind of loveless neurotic who has little idea how destructive she is and how much her idea of virtue is, in fact, the opposite. Her world is constrained by the mores of Elim Pentecostal Church, which is actually a couple of terrace houses in Accrington, a small town about twenty miles north of Manchester. She is the mother from hell—which is ironic because that is where Mrs Winterson thinks everybody is going, most of all poor Jeanette. She thinks that the only treatment for lesbianism is exorcism. After waging a bizarre guerrilla war against her adopted daughter, she concedes defeat and Jeanette leaves home. Mrs Winterson’s last exasperated words to her as she goes out the door are, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’
For all its dry earthiness and comedy, this book is about the pursuit of happiness—which means, for Winterson, as it did for Aristotle, the pursuit of truth. It is a minor miracle that Winterson, having grown up on a starvation ration of both love and honesty, should navigate both these reefs with delicacy. There are a number of broken relationships along the way but Winterson usually points to herself as the person responsible. She never suggests she would be easy to live with. The book includes an extraordinary account of depression and possible suicide, events that took place after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit had been not only a successful novel but a hit in its TV version. It seems that not even that book laid Mrs Winterson to rest. Her legacy was permanent and Winterson had to make peace with that. Finally, there is a search for her birth mother.
There are at least three things that contribute to Winterson’s humane sanity. The first, to borrow an image from the diet that got Winterson through the time after she left home and had to sleep on the back seat of an old Mini, is that she didn’t throw out the hot chips with their greasy paper wrapping. She excoriates the church community she was chained to but still recognises ‘the camaraderie, the simple happiness, the kindness, the sharing, the pleasure of something to do every night in a town where there was nothing to do’.
The second is that she was able to throw out the greasy paper. This is a superb tale of forgiveness and freedom. She recognises Mrs Winterson’s own depression and limitations.
The third is the ability to appreciate hot chips for what they are: that is, to draw nourishment even from a paltry emotional diet. For the young Winterson, this came through reading, an activity Mrs Winterson regarded as highly suspect. Once Jeanette got the bug, she hid books at home under her mattress until her bed started to rise higher and higher. When she found the books, Mrs Winterson burnt them, leaving fragments to flutter in the breeze around the yard. Winterson gathered some up some of the scorched pages and wonders if this is the source of her fragmentary style. She is an unencumbered reader. ‘The library was my door to elsewhere,’ she writes, and she springs through it. She relishes people such as T. S. Eliot who were strangers to her world. Her life was enriched by a long list of writers who have enriched my own: Anne Sexton, Melville (see Chapter 28) and Shakespeare (see Chapter 34). Perhaps we are more similar than I had thought. Indeed, when Winterson turns her attention to ‘utility educators’ whose interests are far too narrow, I want to raise a mug of tea in her honour.