Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

On a plane to NYC I started, and on return finished Jeanette Winterson's Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? a memoir of her early life with her insane adopted mother and her search to find her birth mother.

Jeanette Winterson had been a favorite writer of mine many, many years ago. I had adored The Passion, and very much enjoyed a number of other books, including Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit (also about her mother), but after a while I lost interest.

I'm glad I picked up this memoir. Her mother is a fascinating character, a crazed, religious zealot, and Winterson's prose is beautiful. The second half of the book concerns her search for her birth mother, and this was a hair less interesting to me, although at the end I was deeply moved.

Now I'm going to reread The Passion. Oh, and it also inspired me to read Woolf's Orlando...