Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

by Jeanette Winterson | Biographies & Memoirs | This book has not been rated.
ISBN: 009955609X Global Overview for this book
Registered by prachitulshan of Kolkata, West Bengal India on 11/21/2014
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2 journalers for this copy...
Journal Entry 1 by prachitulshan from Kolkata, West Bengal India on Friday, November 21, 2014
Bought to shorten the wishlist of my birthday buddy.

Blurb:
Heartbreaking and funny: the true story behind Jeanette's bestselling and most beloved novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.

In 1985, at twenty-five, Jeanette published Oranges, the story of a girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, supposed to grow up to be a missionary. Instead, she falls in love with a woman. Disaster.

Oranges became an international bestseller, inspired an award-winning BBC adaptation, and was semi-autobiographical. Mrs. Winterson, a thwarted giantess, loomed over the novel and the author's life: when Jeanette left home at sixteen because she was in love with a woman, Mrs. Winterson asked her: Why be happy when you could be normal? This is Jeanette's story--acute, fierce, celebratory - of a life's work to find happiness: a search for belonging, love, identity, a home.

About a young girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night, and a mother waiting for Armageddon with two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the duster drawer; about growing up in a northern industrial town; about the Universe as a Cosmic Dustbin. She thought she had written over the painful past until it returned to haunt her and sent her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft that supports us when we are sinking.

Journal Entry 2 by prachitulshan at RABCK, A Bookcrossing member -- Controlled Releases on Thursday, December 11, 2014

Released 9 yrs ago (11/22/2014 UTC) at RABCK, A Bookcrossing member -- Controlled Releases

CONTROLLED RELEASE NOTES:

Wishlist book for my birthday buddy...Happy Birthday! May you have a lovely day and a fabulous year ahead! :)

2 books for my reading challenge! Thank you :) I'm looking forward to getting into both of these during the year ahead :D

Released 9 yrs ago (4/1/2015 UTC) at RABCK in -- Controlled Release, -- By post or by hand/ in person -- United Kingdom

WILD RELEASE NOTES:

Hmm.. well, not an easy book, but a very enjoyable one. I had an idea of what was coming (from having read Winterson's fiction) but this was harder because it was real. However ultimately I found it very hopeful - her capacity for forgiveness (of her mother, of her self) and outlook on the world.
Since my mum grew up not far from where the writer did, and around the same era, that was interesting too :) I still have family there and know the area, it's the kind of place where roots are deep and affecting - I share Winterson's pride in that place!

I did find that this book lacked something of the poetry in the way her prose is written, in places

I'm sending this to Italy, to a friend's mum who struggles to get hold of english language books - once she's done she'll share with a friend or leave it somewhere to be found

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