Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- 9,49 €
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- 9,49 €
Publisher Description
The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.
‘Unforgettable… It’s the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up’ Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times
**ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S 100 BEST BOOKS OF THE 21st CENTURY**
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
"What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?" Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit) asks of her relationship with her adoptive mother, questions that haunt this raw memoir to its final pages. Winterson first finds solace in the Accrington Public Library in Lancashire, where she stumbles across T.S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral and begins to cry: "the unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day." She is asked to leave the library for crying and sits on the steps in "the usual northern gale" to finish the book. The rest is history. Highly improbably for a woman of her class, she gets into Oxford and goes on to have a very successful literary career. But she finds that literature and literary success can only fulfill so much in her. There's another ingredient missing: love. The latter part of the book concerns itself with this quest, in which Winterson learns that the problem is not so much being gay (for which her mother tells her "you'll be in Hell") as it is in the complex nature of how to love anyone when one has only known perverse love as a child. This is a highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and endearing memoir.
Customer Reviews
The real Story after the fiction
Hey Jeanette, as always, loved to read you so much. Strange by the way to get through the reality wall... You're the one who made me read in english first. (i'm french). Loved you're fantasy, your poetry, your passion, your words through all of your books... With this book, it's kind of "i'm glad to meet you", get to know you a little... A Powerful book who praises (for me) the powers of poetry and love and loss... Made me think a lot about identity... Thanks for sharing. Thanks for your lively writing. Thanks.