Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Comparative · 2027 & 2028 Leaving Cert

Jeanette Winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? takes its title from a question her adoptive mother asked her, and the whole book is an attempt to answer it. It is funny, angry and unusually honest about the parts of a life that do not resolve.

Winterson published it in 2011, twenty six years after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, the novel that told a version of the same childhood. She is explicit that the novel was the version she could bear to write at twenty five, and that this book is the one underneath it. That relationship between two accounts of one life is worth a sentence in almost any answer.

It is on the comparative list for 2027 and 2028. Most classes take it for Theme or Issue, and it also works well for General Vision and Viewpoint on the 2027 course, because the ending is hard-won rather than happy.

The Story in Five Beats: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

One. Adopted as a baby in 1960 by John and Constance Winterson, she grows up in Accrington, Lancashire, in a strict Pentecostal household. There are six books in the house and two of them are Bibles. She is expected to become a missionary.

Two. She discovers the public library and works through English literature in alphabetical order, hiding paperbacks under her mattress until her mother finds them and burns them in the yard.

Three. At sixteen she falls in love with a girl. The church attempts an exorcism. Her mother asks the question that gives the book its title, and Jeanette leaves home, living in a Mini and working nights while she finishes her A levels.

Four. Oxford, then a first novel at twenty five, then success. The memoir jumps forward and is frank about what success did not fix. In 2007 and 2008 she has a breakdown and a suicide attempt, and writes about both without dressing them up.

Five. She begins the search for her birth mother, a long bureaucratic process described in ordinary detail, and eventually meets her. The reunion is neither a resolution nor a disappointment, and Winterson refuses to tidy it.

Mrs Winterson

The adoptive mother is one of the great characters in modern memoir, and Winterson’s achievement is that she is monstrous and comic at the same time. She keeps a revolver in a drawer, sits up all night rather than share a bed, and has a settled view of the universe in which she personally has been badly treated.

“The Devil led us to the wrong crib.”Mrs Winterson

Notice how that line works. It is said to a child, about that child, and it is delivered as theology rather than cruelty, which is exactly what makes it unanswerable. Winterson does not psychoanalyse her mother or forgive her. She quotes her, often, and lets the quotations accumulate.

Books as an Escape Route

The library sections are where the book is happiest. Reading is presented not as self-improvement but as evidence that other lives exist, which is precisely why it is dangerous in that house.

“The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late.”Mrs Winterson

The burning of the paperbacks is the memoir’s central image, and Winterson’s response to it is the best line of argument in the book: if a book can be burned then the answer is to know poetry by heart, and to write your own. That is a claim about literature that an examiner will notice if you use it.

Adoption and the Story That Starts Without You

Winterson keeps returning to the specific damage of not knowing the beginning of your own story, and she describes it in narrative terms rather than psychological ones.

“Adoption drops you into the story after it has started.”Jeanette Winterson

She connects this directly to becoming a writer. If the first chapter is missing you either spend your life looking for it or you learn to invent chapters, and she has done both. This is the thread that ties the childhood, the breakdown and the search for her birth mother into one book rather than three.

The Breakdown, Told Plainly

The second half is where this memoir separates itself from a misery narrative. Winterson is a successful novelist with a house and an income, and she still comes apart. She describes the voice in her head as a separate presence, describes the attempt on her own life without euphemism, and describes the slow, unglamorous work of recovery.

She refuses the two easy shapes here. She will not say that the childhood caused it, and she will not say that the childhood is irrelevant. If a question asks about how a text presents suffering, this section is where the strongest evidence is.

Accrington, and What a Town Is For

The setting is not background. Winterson is precise about Accrington: a Lancashire mill town after the mills, with a market, a library, a technical college and not much work. She writes about the public library as a civic achievement, built and paid for by people who had almost nothing and who decided that everyone should be able to read.

That gives the book a political edge that a memoir about a difficult mother would not otherwise have. Her escape route was publicly funded, and she says so. For Cultural Context, this is your material: a working class northern English town in the seventies, the church as the main social institution, the grammar school as the exit, and a girl who was not supposed to use it.

Who’s Who

Jeanette Winterson narrates as an adult looking back, and she interrupts herself constantly to correct, argue with or laugh at her younger self.

Mrs Winterson is the adoptive mother, and the book’s whole voltage comes from her.

Dad is quiet, present and largely passive, and the last chapters treat him with unexpected tenderness.

Ann, the birth mother, appears late and is deliberately given very little room, which is itself the point Winterson is making.

The women she loves are handled briskly. This is a book about a mother, not about romance.

Using This in the Exam

How to use it: Three moments will carry most questions: the burning of the books in the back yard, the exorcism at sixteen, and the meeting with her birth mother. Each one gives you a different stage of the same argument about who gets to tell your story. This is a memoir, so you are allowed to talk about the writing itself. Point out that the narrator keeps admitting she is unreliable about her own past, and use the relationship with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit as evidence for it.

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