Confronting a tough childhood
By Kathryn Harrison |
March 23, 2012, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
PERHAPS every autobiographical first novel serves its author as Jeanette Winterson's did - as "a story I could live with." But "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit," buoyant and irrepressible, was published in 1985, for its author half a lifetime ago, and what one can live with changes over time.
"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" is a memoir as unconventional and winning as the Winterson assembled from the less malignant aspects of her eccentric Pentecostal upbringing, a novel that instantly established her distinctive voice. This new book wrings humor from adversity, as did the fictionalized version of Winterson's youth, but the ghastly childhood transfigured there is not the same as the one vivisected here in search of truth and its promise of setting the clear-eyed free.
At the center of both narratives is "Mrs Winterson," as the author often calls her mother in "Why Be Happy." It would be easy to dismiss this formality as an attempt to establish retroactively something that never existed between Winterson and her adoptive mother: a respectful distance governed by commonly accepted standards of decency and reason. But, even more, the form of address suggests the terrible grandeur of a character who transcends the strictly mortal in her dimensions and her power, a monolith to whom any version of "mother" cannot do justice.
The story is of a mother's failure to revise what she finds objectionable in the creature from whom she expects comfort. Beatings make no difference, nor does being "shut in a coal hole."
It's a testament to Winterson's innate generosity, as well as her talent, that she can showcase the outsize humor her mother's equally capacious craziness provides even as she reveals the cruelties Mrs Winterson imposed on her in the name of rearing a God-fearing Christian.
Though she forbade her daughter access to secular books, Mrs Winterson read from the Bible each evening. And she read well enough that her daughter "got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound" but eternal. Mrs Winterson may have found reason to suspect her daughter of cultivating unforgivable secret sins, yet she also trusted her enough to send her to the public library each week to collect the murder mysteries to which she was addicted, as even she was unable to suppress her need for the escape that fiction offered from the claustrophobia of the life her faith dictated.
"A book is a door," Winterson discovered in the library. "You open it. You step through." Once she embarked on English Literature in Prose A-Z, Winterson began to see a way out of the coal hole and into the light. Ambitious in her own (and anyone else's) estimation, she reacted to her mother's confiscation of her secret stash of paperbacks by turning her attention to something no one could take away: the words inside her head and what she could make with them. Determined -- desperate - Winterson left home at 16; she applied "to read English at Oxford because it was the most impossible thing" she could think of; she graduated; she wrote books that transported readers because they were conceived to transport their author.
Fiction has its limits, however. Arriving at midlife, Winterson discovers she can get only so far from Mrs Winterson, either in a novel or in life, before she's brought up short, returned to the wound that made writing necessary in the first place.
"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" is a memoir as unconventional and winning as the Winterson assembled from the less malignant aspects of her eccentric Pentecostal upbringing, a novel that instantly established her distinctive voice. This new book wrings humor from adversity, as did the fictionalized version of Winterson's youth, but the ghastly childhood transfigured there is not the same as the one vivisected here in search of truth and its promise of setting the clear-eyed free.
At the center of both narratives is "Mrs Winterson," as the author often calls her mother in "Why Be Happy." It would be easy to dismiss this formality as an attempt to establish retroactively something that never existed between Winterson and her adoptive mother: a respectful distance governed by commonly accepted standards of decency and reason. But, even more, the form of address suggests the terrible grandeur of a character who transcends the strictly mortal in her dimensions and her power, a monolith to whom any version of "mother" cannot do justice.
The story is of a mother's failure to revise what she finds objectionable in the creature from whom she expects comfort. Beatings make no difference, nor does being "shut in a coal hole."
It's a testament to Winterson's innate generosity, as well as her talent, that she can showcase the outsize humor her mother's equally capacious craziness provides even as she reveals the cruelties Mrs Winterson imposed on her in the name of rearing a God-fearing Christian.
Though she forbade her daughter access to secular books, Mrs Winterson read from the Bible each evening. And she read well enough that her daughter "got a sense early on that the power of a text is not time-bound" but eternal. Mrs Winterson may have found reason to suspect her daughter of cultivating unforgivable secret sins, yet she also trusted her enough to send her to the public library each week to collect the murder mysteries to which she was addicted, as even she was unable to suppress her need for the escape that fiction offered from the claustrophobia of the life her faith dictated.
"A book is a door," Winterson discovered in the library. "You open it. You step through." Once she embarked on English Literature in Prose A-Z, Winterson began to see a way out of the coal hole and into the light. Ambitious in her own (and anyone else's) estimation, she reacted to her mother's confiscation of her secret stash of paperbacks by turning her attention to something no one could take away: the words inside her head and what she could make with them. Determined -- desperate - Winterson left home at 16; she applied "to read English at Oxford because it was the most impossible thing" she could think of; she graduated; she wrote books that transported readers because they were conceived to transport their author.
Fiction has its limits, however. Arriving at midlife, Winterson discovers she can get only so far from Mrs Winterson, either in a novel or in life, before she's brought up short, returned to the wound that made writing necessary in the first place.
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