Miért lennél boldog, ha lehetsz normális? by Jeanette Winterson

It is a harrowing exploration of the self, reading much like a companion to her exquisite and semi-autobiographical debut novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit but going further and exploring the harsh memories that she fictionalized because she ‘ wrote a story I could live with. It is my mother.’ Jeanette Winterson’s stern adoptive mother given to religious excess casts a long shadow over her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, the title coming from a response she gave to Winterson telling her that she is happy loving another woman, and Winterson turns her perfect prose and brilliant mind that has crafted dazzling and fantastical stories inward to examine her own history. ‘ I have written love narratives and loss narratives,’ Winterson writes, ‘ it all seems so obvious now – the Wintersonic obsessions of love, loss and longing. Where everything starts, where we always return. Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.

She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage.

She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote 'Great Moments in Aviation,' a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 'Best of Young British Writers' in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Novelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959.

Miért lennél boldog, ha lehetsz normális? by Jeanette Winterson