★ ★ ★ ★ ★
I have a memory - true or not true?
Back in 1985, Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene with her semi-autobiographical first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. The heroine, Jeanette, grows up in the Northern town of Accrington, the adopted child of two evangelical Christians: her meek, introverted father, and his wife, the towering, larger-than-life madwoman she refers to as Mrs. Winterson. In a house where the Bible is the only acceptable reading material, Jeanette squirrels away paperbacks under her mattress and, when Mrs. Winterson finds and burns them, resolves to start writing her own books. The desire to escape the confines of impoverished, industrial Accrington grows in Jeanette, especially after her love affair with another girl is discovered and Mrs. Winterson, along with her fundamentalist church, quite literally attempts to exorcise the 'demon' of lesbianism from her. Finally, given an ultimatum, she chooses freedom and her sexual identity, and Mrs. Winterson kicks her out with the parting words, "Why be happy when you could be normal?"
I am often asked, in a tick-box kind of way, what is 'true' and what is not 'true' in Oranges . (...) I can't answer these questions. Twenty-six years later, Winterson revisits her autobiography to fill in some of the missing gaps in Orangers. What emerges is a far sadder account of a deprived, sometimes violent childhood, and an adult life fraught with the lingering insecurities of someone rejected first by her teenage birth mother and then by her dysfunctional adoptive mother. In spite of the profound grief conveyed in this book, it is no misery memoir. Winterson emerges triumphant from a horrific bout of depression triggered by the end of a long-term relationship and the search for her birth mother that began with an adoption certificate found amongst her late mother's belongings. She describes regaining confidence in her ability to love and be loved, and a guns-blazing return to creativity. Stubbornly (and quite rightly) proud of her accomplishments, in Why be Happy, Winterson is as uncompromising and in-your-face as ever about the importance of art, language and education as sustenance for the soul in an increasingly utilitarian, consumer-driven society. Why Be Happy may be a more sombre and detailed version of the events first described in Oranges, but it holds no more claim to being 'true' than Winterson's first book. It hardly matters whether Mrs. Winterson's varicose vein really ruptured when Jeanette returned home and reasserted her identity as a lesbian, or whether it is possible that Jeanette's father could have slept through an air raid in which the house around him was reduced to rubble. Ultimately, to enjoy Winterson's work is to savour the elegance of language, drink up the writing like a fine wine and let yourself go enough to feel some of the same passion that inspired it.
Yes, the stories are dangerous, [Mrs. Winterson] was right. A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?
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