Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Paperback

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Sale price  $18.00 Regular price 
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Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Paperback

$18.00
Sale price  $18.00 Regular price 

Book Overview

by Jeanette Winterson (Author)

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 the New 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.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a "singular and electric" memoir about a life's work to find happiness (The New York Times). It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking.

Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging--for love, identity, home, and a mother.


Author Biography

Born in Manchester in 1959 and adopted into a firmly religious family, JEANETTE WINTERSON put herself through higher education and studied at Oxford University. She is the author of numerous novels, including Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Sexing the Cherry, and The Passion. Winterson lives in Gloucestershire, UK.

Visit her website at jeanettewinterson.com

Number of Pages: 240
Dimensions: 0.9 x 8.1 x 5.5 IN
Publication Date: March 12, 2013
ISBN9780802120878
Author Jeanette Winterson
PublisherGrove Press
GenreBiography and Education
FormatPaperback
PublishedMarch 2013
LanguageENG- English
Pages240
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

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About Jeanette Winterson

Jeanette Winterson CBE was born in Manchester. She is a beloved cultural icon and queer trailblazer who published her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, at twenty-five. Over two decades later she revisited that material in her internationally bestselling memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Winterson has written thirteen novels for adults and three collections of short stories, as well as children's books, non-fiction and screenplays. Her novel Written on the Body was named one of the 25 Most Influential Works of Postwar Queer Literature by the New York Times. Since her innovative and forward-thinking writing about AI in her essay collection 12 Bytes, she speaks at tech conferences around the world. She is professor of New Writing at the University of Manchester and writes a popular Substack, Mind Over Matter. She lives in the Cotswolds in a wood and in Spitalfields, London.

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