Searching for a room of one’s own

It’s a strange experience to read another person’s reflections on their own life. When I read memoirs, although I know that the author has chosen to write about themselves so personally, I still feel like a bit of an intruder. I feel this with particular acuteness when reading passages about the dead, as it is not clear how much information might be too much.

With these reservations in the back of my mind, I opened the recently published memoir of Jeanette Winterson, _Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?_ It must be said first of all that this is a poignant and well-written book – funny at times, poetic at others.

But the intimacy of Winterson’s portrayal of her adoptive mother, the formidable Mrs. Winterson – sometimes a dispassionate Mrs. W; the knowledge imparted to the reader of the psychological damage done to Winterson at this woman’s hands gave me a bit of a sense of being the guest at a family dinner who doesn’t know where to look when a fight breaks out among the family members.

Nonetheless, Mrs. W is a fascinatingly damaged character, and any reticence about her on the author’s part would undoubtedly have impoverished the rest of the book.

Winterson herself appears as a rougher, tougher Matilda-type who you wish would be taken in and adored by her own Miss Honey.It doesn’t get quite so neatly tied up as that for Winterson, but the narrative, which largely traces her childhood spent with her adoptive parents, is littered with increasingly less unhinged characters who, in their own ways, help Winterson escape and recover from the cruelties of her youth, inflicted on her by her mother.

Anyone who has read Winterson’s 1985 debut novel _Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit_ or seen the BBC adaptation will be familiar with the story of the author’s decision to leave home at the age of sixteen and make her own way in the world. Raised in the working-class town of Accrington, Lancashire, on Mrs. W’s apocalyptic religious sentiments and the refrain that she was a ‘Devil baby’, Winterson committed the sin of being gay and incurred the fury of her mother.

First, she was subjected to an exorcism. When that failed, an ultimatum: give up your girlfriend and be normal, or get out.

Winterson’s trials and successes following her departure from the family home are movingly told, always with an underlying melancholy over not only the inevitability of the rupture with Mrs. W, but also the tragedy of her mother’s having lived in such self-imposed isolation.

Skipping ahead twenty-five years, the latter part of the book describes Winterson’s breakdown after the end of her six-year relationship with a theatre director, her slow recovery from an attempted suicide, and her decision to search for her birth mother after the discovery of her original but defaced adoption papers (Mrs. W. is dead by this point).

The harrowing experience of trying to track down the woman who gave her up at just six weeks old is also an attempt to learn, at last, that she is loved, that she was and is wanted.Of all the punishments and cruelties meted out to her by Mrs. Winterson – the nights spent locked out of the house or in a coal-hole as a child, the hurtful words, the oppressive home life – Winterson’s inability to believe that she could be truly loved, and the fact that for such a long time she ‘had not found a way to love’, are by far the worst.

Yet even though Mrs. Winterson underpins the entire story and shapes in so many ways the course of Winterson’s life, this is no personal diatribe against Winterson’s own hard luck. This is also a celebration and eulogy to the north that Winterson knew as a child; the neighbourliness, the noise of the markets, the language with its assimilated quotes from Shakespeare and the Bible. It is an homage to the great writers (from A to Z) who rescued her with words – ‘every book was a message in a bottle.’ It is a rumination on the significant ideas and symbols of life that are scattered not only through literary works but also through the human psyche – home, thresholds between inside and outside, time and all its varying speeds.

But most of all, it is a meditation on love and happiness, and a search for a room of one’s own.