Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Jeanette Winterson’s memoir of an adopted girl growing up under a fierce Pentecostal mother in working-class Lancashire, who finds her way out through books and then has to go back and find herself. Here is what you need to know before you study it for the Comparative.

The book is told by Jeanette, who was adopted as a baby and raised in Accrington, a mill town in the north of England, by Mr and Mrs Winterson. The adoptive mother dominates the whole memoir, and Winterson rarely calls her “my mother”: she calls her “Mrs Winterson”, which already tells you how distant and watchful that relationship felt. Mrs Winterson is a strict evangelical Christian who keeps a revolver in a drawer, locks the growing girl out of the house at night, and believes the End of the World is always close at hand. The home is poor, cold and ruled by religion. It is also, crucially, a house with almost no books in it, because Mrs Winterson distrusts fiction. The one she keeps, famously, is one she is sure of, and her suspicion of the rest tells you everything about the world Jeanette is trying to grow inside.

Against all that, the young Jeanette discovers reading. She works her way through the town library, hides paperbacks under her mattress, and learns that literature is a door out of a life that feels too small and too controlled. The crisis of the book comes when she falls in love with a girl. When Mrs Winterson finds out, she throws the question that gives the memoir its title, and Jeanette is effectively forced out of the home as a teenager. The second half of the story jumps forward to the adult writer: successful, but carrying the wound of that childhood, breaking down, and finally deciding to search for the birth mother she has never known. The memoir is honest about how hard and strange that search is, and it refuses to wrap things up neatly.

Study Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

This is a strong Comparative text because everything in it is arguable: how the home shapes the child, what books are actually for, whether you can ever go home again. Start with the angle below, then build your comparisons across your other two texts.