Rewriting a Childhood

Jeanette Winterson's writing in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? was mesmerizing in both its style and theme. First of all, she always refers to her mother as "Mrs. Winterson," creating a strong sense of detachment between the two. Additionally, she repeats words and phrases to complicate this established sense of detachment, drawing comparisons between her mother and herself when she writes, "I went to a phone box—I had no phone. She went to a phone box—she had no phone." These stylistic choices make a huge impact on the work as a whole and really grabbed my attention.

Additionally, Winterson's exploration of the importance of writing in her own life was incredibly powerful. She writes about the art of writing itself with so much love and appreciation; for her, its a form of freedom and self-expression, a way to inject more kindness into the story of her life and break the silence of her childhood. She added a caring figure into her semi-autobiographical work Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit because she "wished it had been that way." She took solace in telling her own story in order "to avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs. Winterson's." She promises us that writing can be healing medicine if we let it.