Cressida Connolly

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

issue 05 November 2011

In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett. At her finest, (in which category I’d put The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and Lighthousekeeping) there is no one to match her.

The title of this memoir comes from the mouth of Mrs Winterson of Accrington, Lancs, the author’s adoptive mother. This is what she replied when her young daughter told her that she was in love with another girl, and happy. It is a testament to the subtlety and control of Jeanette Winterson’s prose that this monstrous woman, who, by her coldness and her madness and her misery, caused her only child such dreadful suffering, emerges from these pages as a figure of dark comedy, even of pathos.

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