Why be Happy When you Could be Normal?

Locations
Call Number: 921 Winterson, Jeanette
On Shelf At: Downtown Library

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Winterson, Jeanette	4-week checkout	On Shelf
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	921 Winterson, Jeanette	4-week checkout	Due 05-21-2024

Originally published: London : Jonathan Cape, 2011.
Traces the author's lifelong search for happiness as the adopted daughter of Pentecostal parents who raised her through practices of fierce control and paranoia, an experience that prompted her to search for her biological mother.

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COMMUNITY REVIEWS

Why am I me? submitted by pkooger on September 18, 2012, 1:29pm Jeanette Winterson is a great writer. It's very hard to convey a thought combined with a feeling, but Winterson is great at bringing readers into her own personal experiences and worldview. Her life story is fascinating, and she expertly interweaves it with literature, psychology, philosophy, and theology. Winterson is clearly at home with the "big ideas" of life, and her story is all the more interesting for their inclusion. I really enjoyed her approach to the question, "What factors make us who we are?"

Introspective and Intelligent submitted by Sara W on August 20, 2015, 3:49pm I have admired Jeannette Winterson since I first read "Oranges are not the Only Fruit," and I was eager to read this book and learn more about the autobiographical elements in that novel. Winterson's upbringing was unusual and difficult, but this memoir focuses on her ability to recognize its strangeness and come to understand who she was in spite of her restricted surroundings. This is an excellent memoir for anyone, but especially those who find themselves being or feeling "different" than what they grew up understanding was "normal."

A bumpy ride of a memoir submitted by gtaylor on July 18, 2022, 10:35pm This memoir irked me in multiple ways. Her narrative style is very stream-of-consciousness, and she explains her reasoning for this, but it was difficult for me to keep up with her. She also quotes herself and her other books throughout this one, which I found a bit pretentious. She has lived a notable life and survived some extreme hardships. Unfortunately, her writing came off as whiny and self-important to me. Overall, I had a hard time with this one and my eyeballs got a work-out from all the rolling they did.