WHY BE HAPPY When You Could Be Normal? was written in a jolt of energy. In two weeks I found I had 15,000 words.
Why?
Is it a memoir? Not really. I think of it as an experiment with experience. None of us recalls our past as though we had carefully filmed it every moment of every day. And what if we had done? What lies beyond the frame? What was happening in our minds? There is always more to say, more to see, more to know.
I had a breakdown between summer 2007 and the end of 2008. In the autumn of 2008 someone I had loved deeply died too early, and at Christmas of that year my father died too. I buried him in a cold Saturnian January, and cancelled an interview with Susie Orbach, a woman I much admired and yet had never met. By May 2009 Susie and I were lovers.
And I had started to hunt for my birth mother – or Bio-Ma, as we called her.
Why?
Clearing out my father’s things, I found some paperwork – yellowed, typewritten, as ancient as a codex, or so it felt, but really only from the early 1960s. My adoption. Some details about where I had been, and who I had been before that adoption.
I was no longer in breakdown, and Susie was, and is, a huge part of the healing of my mind. With her, I was able to go through the cellular trauma of looking into a past I had written (Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit) in order to own it, understand it, and, yes, to control it.
I knew early, how or why I don’t know, that if you can read yourself as a fiction as well as a fact, you will be freer. If you are a story, you can change that story, especially how it ends.
I know this kind of thinking has been hijacked by the neo-liberal agenda of anyone can be a millionaire, a celebrity, a president. And if you are not what or who you want to be, it is your fault. Social justice and global inequality, class, race, background, has nothing to do with it. Utter crap and we know that.
But …
For some reason my imagination was strong and I was aligned with myself in crucial ways. For all the fuck-ups and failures, I knew I could write my way out – and I did.
Oranges is fiction. It’s not the story of my life and I am not the Jeanette in that story. That is the point. I became my own fiction.
But …
Twenty-seven years after writing that book, the cluster of happenings I have described – and one I seem to have left out – forced me back towards the material I knew, and forward towards new material I never thought I wanted, or needed, to face.
As a writer I find I am forced towards discomfort, which is not the same thing as discontent.
The title comes from a Mrs W line, the day she gave me the clear choice of giving up the girl I loved or leaving home. I was sixteen. In our gloomy, cramped terraced house, with its body-count backyard (the kind of place where you bury your victims), and where she had operatically burnt my books in a Gotterdammerung of destruction, she asked me why I was doing this (‘this’ being in love, fatally, transgressively). I said, ‘It makes me happy.’ She said, ‘WBHWYCBN?’
I wondered then, and have done for a long time since, whether this was a true binary, like black/white, good/evil, day/night, happy/normal?
It was a good question, if a brutal one, for us to end on. It was a gift, though a dark one, though I didn’t know it at the time.
She was a violent philosopher.
WHEN LOVE IS unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. In the beginning the love you get is the love that sets.
I did not know that love could have continuity. I did not know that human love could be depended upon. Mrs Winterson’s god was the God of the Old Testament and it may be that modelling yourself on a deity who demands absolute love from his ‘children’ but thinks nothing of drowning them (Noah’s Ark), attempting to kill the ones who madden him (Moses), and letting Satan ruin the life of the most blameless of them all (Job), is bad for love.
True, God reforms himself and improves thanks to his relationship with human beings, but Mrs Winterson was not an interactive type; she didn’t like human beings and she never did reform or improve. She was always striking me down, and then making a cake to put things right, and very often after a lockout we’d walk down to the fish and chip shop the next night and sit on the bench outside eating from the newspaper and watching people come and go.
For most of my life I have behaved in much the same way because that is what I learned about love. Add to that my own wildness and intensity and love becomes pretty dangerous. I never did drugs, I did love – the crazy reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health. And I fought and hit out and tried to put it right the next day. And I went away without a word and didn’t care.
Love is vivid. I never wanted the pale version. Love is full strength. I never wanted the diluted version. I never shied away from love’s hugeness but I had no idea that love could be as reliable as the sun. The daily rising of love.