I never saw myself diving into memoirs, but here I am, totally hooked!
An English author Jeanette Winterson in her memoir "Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" writes about her childhood (and not only, cause when you talk about your childhood it means that you also talk about your present and future) and it's really an emotional journey.
She was adopted by a dysfunctional family: "Inside our house the light is on. Dad’s on the night shift, so she can go to bed, but she won’t sleep. She’ll read the Bible all night, and when Dad comes home, he’ll let me in, and he’ll say nothing, and she’ll say nothing, and we’ll act like it’s normal to leave your kid outside all night, and normal never to sleep with your husband. And normal to have two sets of false teeth, and a revolver in the duster drawer … ". She was not lucky, she didn't have a loving mother:
"WHEN MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib."
"I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none)"
Jeanette wanted her mother to be supportive (who doesn't want it, yeah?!), but: "She tells me that my success is from the Devil, keeper of the wrong crib."
But we also see that Mrs Winterson (author's mother) was not kind to herself too: "Only later, much later, too late, did I understand how small she was to herself. The baby nobody picked up. The uncarried child still inside her."; for her life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped; Every day she prayed, ‘Lord, let me die’; she was waiting for Apocalypse.
And what about Father? where is he? why is he silent? why is he just a marionette of his wife? Why he doesn't fight for his child? "He always loved you but she wouldn’t let him."- is this a good reason to let go someone you love?
Yes, Fathers are full of question marks.
Sometimes we have to find answers by ourselves, as the author did:
"Don’t be frightened, Dad.’
‘No, no,’ he nods, comforted, a little boy. He was always a little boy, and I am upset that I didn’t look after him, upset that there are so many kids who never get looked after, and so they can’t grow up. They can get older, but they can’t grow up. That takes love. If you are lucky the love will come later. If you are lucky you won’t hit love in the face."
I think that this phrase from the book: "During the sixteen years that I lived at home, my father was on shift work at the factory, or he was at church. That was his pattern.
My mother was awake all night and depressed all day. That was her pattern.
I was at school, at church, out in the hills, or reading in secret. That was my pattern" really describes author's dysfunctional family and shows us a very simple but at the same time an ugly truth: we have to deal not only with our own patterns, but with other people's too.
One of the main topic, author wants us to think about is Adoption- how adopted children feel (in such families she had) and what kind of traumas they have to deal with:
"Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb."
"The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing"
"Adoption is outside. You act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong. And you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you. It is impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself. "
And we can't avoid "The Trouble With A Book", cause for me, to be honest it was the most interesting part.
The author was reading is secret, she was hiding it:
"THERE WERE SIX BOOKS IN our house. One was the Bible and two were commentaries on the Bible.
I asked my mother why we couldn’t have books and she said, ‘The trouble with a book is that you never know what’s in it until it’s too late."
For Jeanette, books were like her safe haven, her escape hatch from reality. They were the cozy little shelter where she could weather any storm and find a bit of peace amidst the chaos: "I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me. "; but author also says that it was not only a hiding place, literature for her was also a finding place. Through literature, she found pieces of her identity and realized she wasn’t as alone as she once thought
Some people have the luxury of choosing to be a writer, but not our author. For them, writing wasn’t a choice; it was a necessity. It all started on the day her mother burned all her books:
"Mrs Winterson knew that Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer, and hurling it out of the window, she rummaged and rifled and I came tumbling o the bed while she threw book after book out of the window and into the backyard. I was grabbing books and trying to hide them, the dog was running o with them, my dad was standing helpless in his pyjamas. When she had done, she picked up the little paraffin stove we used to heat the bathroom, went into the yard, poured paraffin over the books and set them on fire.
I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. And books have always been light and warmth to me.
‘Fuck it,’ I thought, ‘I can write my own." we can say that mother made "a monster" :))
"It took me a long time to realise that there are two kinds of writing; the one you write and the one that writes you. The one that writes you is dangerous. You go where you don’t want to go. You look where you don’t want to look."- But it's necessary—we need to be aware of our emotions, traumas, and fears. Trust me, with that kind of self-knowledge, life gets a whole lot easier. It’s like having a map for navigating through the tough times.
Otherwise, these unacknowledged feelings and fears can have a huge impact on our lifestyle and decisions. It's like letting unseen forces steer the ship:
"But even when I did make friends I made sure it went wrong … If someone liked me, I waited until she was o guard, and then I told her I didn’t want to be her friend any more. I watched the confusion and upset. The tears. Then I ran o, triumphantly in control, and very fast the triumph and the control leaked away, and then I cried and cried, because I had put myself on the outside again, on the doorstep again, where I didn’t want to be."
Her traumas led her to believe she was an unlovable person, as a result, she developed a very unhealthy image of love. Her experiences twisted her understanding of what love should be, making it hard for her to see it clearly:
"I never believed that my parents loved me. I tried to love them but it didn’t work. It has taken me a long time to learn how to love – both the giving and the receiving. I have written about love obsessively, forensically, and I know/knew it as the highest value. I loved God of course, in the early days, and God loved me. That was something. And I loved animals and nature. And poetry. People were the problem. How do you love another person? How do you trust another person to love you? I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss?"
"And all my life I have repeated patterns of rejection. My success with my books felt like gatecrashing. When critics and the press turned on me, I roared back in rage, and no, I didn’t believe the things they said about me or my work, because my writing has always stayed clear and luminous to me, uncontaminated, but I did know that I wasn’t wanted.
And I have loved most extravagantly where my love could not be returned in any sane and steady way – the triangles of marriages and complex affiliations. I have failed to love well where I might have done, and I have stayed in relationships too long because I did not want to be a quitter who did not know how to love."
“Education is the key that unlocks the golden door to freedom.” (George Washington Carver) and the author knew it, She knew she had to fight for her freedom, and a good education was a powerful ally in that battle. It would give her the tools and knowledge she needed to break free and carve out her own path. But unfortunately Oxford was not only the house of education, it was also a house of sexism, snobbery, patriarchal attitudes and indifference to student welfare. Despite its prestigious reputation, it had its fair share of flaws: "Our tutor turned to me and said, ‘You are the working-class experiment.’ Then he turned to the woman who was to become and remain my closest friend, and he said, ‘You are the black experiment’ and our main character had to deal with all these.
And Jeanette was able to do it: She became a well-known writer, she did her best to deal with traumas, she understood that "twice born was not just about being alive, but about choosing life" and that "It takes courage to feel the feeling". But if you ask me, the most important thing she understood is that we can be in cab for fifty years, but we are able to leave it at any moment, we just need a courage and a desire.
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