This book came in the mail today, I opened the package, opened the book and looked at a few pages randomly, started reading, and about half an hour later turned back to the beginning so I could start reading it properly. That's as good a star ranking as anything, I think. This book isn't really a memoir, (but then again, if you expect linear storytelling from Jeanette Winterson....): it skips twenty-five years of her life in an "Intermission" and the end is so open-ended a great breeze might com...

Back on my bullshit**Winterson obsession

This is a remarkable memoir, honest and very moving; beautifully written and there is a passion for reading and books that runs through it. Winterson describes books as her hearth and home and I know exactly what she means. As well as being a moving memoir, it is a memoir that will resonate with every lover of books. This is also a follow up from the fictionalised version of Winterson’s childhood: Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. The first half of the book outlines the real story of Winterson’s c...

This is about a girl who was adopted by a religious lunatic and who realised she was a lesbian.Yes.Uh oh.It's a squirmy, maddening, elusive, full-frontal, raging, psychonewagebabbly, moving, heartfelt, essential memoir. I was going to be cute and say that in 1969 The Beatles decided to release an album on which there were no overdubs, no studio tricks at all, but the resulting album Let It Be broke its own rule by containing overdubbed strings & harps & choruses; so many years later Paul McCartn...

Read this if you want your heart broken. Read this if you need it healed.

Beautifully written, engrossing, and suffused with a love of the saving power of literature. This is the truer, grittier, more analytical version of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit (my review HERE), with an update of Winterson's very recent attempts to trace her birth mother, and interspersed with thoughts on words, writing, literature and a dash of politics of family, class, feminism and sexuality. It is better if you are familiar with Oranges, but not essential. There also seem to be significan...

Jeanette Winterson is certainly one of my favourite female writers. Her words speak to me, and they linger, long after the book is closed. She causes me to cry, with a mere sentence, but most of all, I feel that she would understand me.This book is all about Winterson, and her quest for identity. She was adopted in the early 1960s, and by reading her other book, called Oranges are not the only fruit, one realises that she hasn't had the easiest of childhoods. When one is told that they are adopt...

I usually don't read lots of memoirs and biographies, in general I prefer fiction or non-fiction, but I must say thought that this is one of the most genuine and emotional memoirs I've ever read. Jeannette Winterson was born in Manchester, England, and grew up in Accrington, Lacarshire after being adopted by Constance and John William Winterson in the early 1960's.This book recounts her quest for her identity, origin, her (birth) mother and ultimately for love and acceptance.It's a different kin...

Books mean a great deal to me. Are you surprised to hear me say this? I think not. As a consequence, I really enjoy reading books about people who really enjoy books. It’s just how these things work. And Jeanette Winterson really, really, likes books. When she had nothing, she always had her books: they gave her courage and strength. This is a book for those that love reading and writing; this is a book for those that understand why someone would spend their entire life doing such things: it is

This is a book that will remain in my memory and soul forever... I had absolutely no idea what I was going to read, I took this book by chance thinking it was a woman’s story and the discovery of Winterson's homosexuality. Instead this book is shocking, it's a bomb, it enters in your bowels leaving the reader ( to me surely) often unable to go on the reading for the trauma and psychological violence written there. I didn’t even know I would be a witness reading of a woman with a very serious psy...

There are authors who continually write and rewrite the same story, continually sand down the same hard facts, continually polish and repolish until they arrive at the final version which has the perfectly smooth shape of an egg, newly laid. And at whatever angle you choose to view that egg, it remains perfect, impossible to add to or take away from. I'm thinking here of John McGahern in particular, who worked on the hard facts of a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood in many and var...

Despite the humour and the occasional glimmer of hope, there were times when I found this book almost too hard to read. I imagine writing about it will prove equally traumatising, so I'll say only that this memoir was superbly written, and heartbreakingly honest, and will remain with me for a very long time.

I'm very glad I read this - I wasn't going to - I put it down at page 8, thinking it was going to be a glorifying, self-referencing re-write of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. I was wrong. Sometimes I think, books come into your hands - not by accident. I was in a reading rut; I could not settle to anything after Villette - but here I am rescued by a Northener, and my mind slips easily to Hilary Mantel, Wendy Cope - there is something about being Northern. It is very much part of our identity.Af...

There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feelingI might have expected the audacity of this book, but the humility startled me. I expected the old trauma, but the fresh wounds caught me off guard. I was reminded of What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness which I didn't think much of at all; the trauma memoir is not a genre I get along with. I love t...

Resolute and unsentimental, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal reckons with the legacy of childhood neglect. In the memoir’s first part Jeanette Winterson reflects on her experience of growing up gay in Accrington, England, inside the household of her adoptive mother, a Pentecostal fanatic prone to abusive tendencies. In matter-of-fact prose, with great wit, the author confronts the harrowing conditions of her childhood; narrates the social history of her working-class hometown; and recounts

I finished this book on a frigid Sunday afternoon, lying lazily on my too-deep couch, covered in a ridiculously soft blanket, with my boyfriend cackling in the other room while watching "news fails" on YouTube and my little dog curled up by my side, lending me his warmth. I have had such an easy life, it is sometimes difficult to fathom.Jeanette Winterson has not had an easy life. Or anyway she had an almost impossibly surreal / awful childhood (adopted by a frighteningly inconsistent and extrem...

I have read three of Winterson's books; The Gap of Time, a retelling of Shakespeare's Winters Tale, The Passion, and Christmas Stories. In each case, the prose outweighed anything I might have felt about the story itself, because there is some indefinable quality there that defies description. In this, a memoir of her childhood as an adopted child of a Pentecostal woman who was mentally ill, and her search for her birth mother in middle age after she had become a celebrated author, the same thin...

If you read Oranges are Not the Only Fruit then this just reads like an early version before the editor said to the author, "You can't write that, no one will believe you." The cliché goes that truth is stranger than fiction and this book is definitely stranger than Oranges. It is hard, for instance, to believe that the author, as an adult, never addressed her mother as anything but Mrs. Winterson.Small personal anecdote that has nothing whatsoever to do with the book other than it's a bit about...

this book is a broken elegy to the north of england and a world of small shops, small communities, and simple habits that no longer exists. it's also a tribute to a hardy working class people who knows resilience, pluckiness, no-nonsensicality, and making a life out of what you are given. surprisingly, it's a vindication of the values of faith, which keep people under the direst circumstances out of the clutches of despair and of the feeling of being trapped. these are winterson's words. this tr...

I do not know why I haven’t picked up a Jeanette Winterson book earlier. I loved this a whole lot and cannot wait to read more of her books. Jeanette Winterson tells the story of relationship with her mothers; both her biological mother and her adopted mother. I listened to her tell this story on audiobook and I cannot recommend this highly enough. Winterson infuses the story with her wry tone and wit and it was just a wonderful listening experience.The family she is adopted in are conservative