Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

LoveReading Says

A 2013 World Book Night selection.

Shortlisted for the Specsavers National Book Awards 'UK Author of the Year' 2012.

A companion to Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, allowing Jeanette Winterson to explore the truth (often far worse than the fictionalised version) behind her autobiographical novel. The power of the written word to a child is brilliantly captured, books allowing the author to escape and find her own life – to write her own words.

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 In 1990 Jeanette Winterson published her funny, erudite, semi-autobiographical novel Oranges Are not the only Fruit about a young girl growing up in an evangelical family rebelling religiously, socially and sexually. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is the brilliant doppelganger to this novel, a memoir about belonging, exploring Winterson’s search for her birth mother, but also her love and relationship with books, as she writes, “Books don’t make a home…they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside.

Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space.” Brilliant for all fanatic readers and writers.

Susanna Crossman, from our Best Autobiographies Ever Blog. 

About Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

A New York Times bestseller: The ';magnificent' memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time';A tour de force of literature and love' (Vogue). One of theNew York Times' ';50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years' Jeanette Winterson's bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes.

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