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“Why Be
Happy When You Could Be Normal? is raucous. It hums with a dark refulgence
from its first pages…Singular and electric…[Winterson’s] life with her adoptive
parents was often appalling, but it made her the writer she is.”
— New York Times
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“Stunningly lovely and fearlessly reflective, Why Be Happy is a reminder of what the
project of remembering and recording can—and should—be.”
— Bookreporter
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“As compulsively readable as Truth and Beauty, Ann Patchett’s great
memoir of friendship…A tribute to the salvation of narrative.”
— Shelf Awareness
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“She’s one of the most daring and inventive
writers of our time—searingly honest yet effortlessly lithe as she slides
between forms, exuberant and unerring, demanding emotional and intellectual
expansion of herself and of us…She explores not only the structure of
storytelling but the interplay of past, present, and future, blending science
fiction, realism, and a deep love of literature and history…In Why Be Happy, [Winterson’s] emotional
life is laid bare. [Her] struggle to first accept and then love herself yields
a bravely frank narrative of truly coming undone. For someone in love with
disguises, Winterson’s openness is all the more moving; there’s nothing left to
hide, and nothing left to hide behind.”
— Elle
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“To read Jeanette Winterson is to love her…The
fierce, curious, brilliant British writer is winningly candid in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?…[Winterson
has] such a joy for life and love and language that she quickly becomes her
very own one-woman band—one that, luckily for us, keeps playing on.”
— O, The Oprah Magazine
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“Magnificent…What begins as a tragicomic tale of
triumph over a soul-destroying childhood becomes something rougher and richer
in the later passages…Winterson writes with heartrending precision…Ferociously
funny and unfathomably generous, Winterson’s exorcism-in-writing is an
unforgettable quest for belonging, a tour de force of literature and love.”
— Vogue
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“Jeanette Winterson’s sentences become lodged in
the brain for years, like song lyrics…Beautiful…Powerful…Shockingly revealing…Raw
and undigested…Never has anyone so outsized and exceptional struggled through
such remembered pain to discover how intensely ordinary she was meant to be.”
— Slate
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“Bold…One of the most entertaining and moving
memoirs in recent memory…A coming-of-age story, a coming-out story, and a
celebration of the act of reading…A marvelous gift of consolation and wisdom.”
— Boston Globe
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“Unflinching…That Winterson should have survived
such a terrible early immersion in darkness at all is a kind of miracle. That
she should have emerged, if not unscathed then still a functioning human being
and a creative artist, is an even greater accomplishment.”
— San Francisco Chronicle
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“With raw honesty and wit, Winterson reveals how
she fought her way to adulthood, finding success, love—and ultimately
forgiveness.”
— People (starred review)
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“There’s always been something Byronic about Winterson—a
stormily passionate soul bitterly indicting the society that excludes her while
feeding on the Romantic drama of that exclusion…Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? restores Winterson to her
full power…This is a book that will inspire much underlining.”
— Salon
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“[Winterson’s] novels—mongrels of autobiography,
myth, fantasy, and formal experimentation—evince a colossal stamina for
self-scrutiny…[A] proud and vivid portrait of working-class life…This bullet of
a book is charged with risk, dark mirth, hard-won self-knowledge…You’re in the
hands of a master builder who has remixed the memoir into a work of terror and
beauty.”
— Bookforum
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“Exquisite…About survival and triumph, but also
about deep wounds.”
— LAMBDA Literary Review
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“[Winterson] is piercingly honest, deeply
creative, and stubbornly self-confident…A testimony to the power of love and
the need to feel wanted.”
— Seattle Times
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“As beautifully crafted as any of Winterson’s
fiction.”
— ForeWord
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“A moving, artfully constructed piece of writing
that sustains tension until the last sentence.”
— Globe and Mail (Toronto)
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“Winterson pulls back the veil on her life as
she really lived it and shows us that truth is not only stranger than fiction,
but more painful and more beautiful as well…Searing and candid…Winterson holds
nothing back…Written with poetic beauty.”
— BookPage
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“Riveting…Beautifully open…Why Be Happy is a meditation on loss, stories, and silences.”
— Newsday
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“There’s a lot of flinty humor here, a lot of
insight into the emotional legacy of adoption—and a generally refreshing
admission that understanding life is as hard as living it.”
— Entertainment Weekly
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“Arresting and suspenseful…Offers literary
surprises and flashes of magnificent generosity and humor.”
— Washington Post Book World
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“[Why Be
Happy] very possibly [contains] the most honest writing Winterson has ever
done: bone-hard, bone-naked truth that hides nothing about the discovery
process of finding her biological mother, and going mad…Her observations read
as verses of the King James Bible: bold, beautiful, and true.”
— Los Angeles Times Review of Books
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“Captivating…A painful and poignant story of
redemption, sexuality, identity, love, loss, and, ultimately, forgiveness.”
— Huffington Post
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“Shattering, brilliant…There is a sense at the
end of this brave, funny, heartbreaking book that Winterson has somehow
reconciled herself to the past. Without her adoptive mother, she wonders what
she would be—Normal? Uneducated? Heterosexual?—and she doesn’t much fancy the
prospect…She might have been happy and normal, but she wouldn’t have been
Jeanette Winterson. Her childhood was ghastly, as bad as Dickens’s stint in the
blacking factory, but it was also the crucible for her incendiary talent.”
— Sunday Times (UK)
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“Unconventional, ambitious…The experience of
reading Why Be Happy is unusually
visceral. Winterson confronts her actions, personality quirks, even sexuality,
with a kind of violence, as if forcing herself to be honest…The prose is often
breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty, and vigorous all at once.”
— Financial Times
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“An extraordinary tragic-comic literary
autobiography.”
— Guardian (UK)
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“Raw…A highly unusual, scrupulously honest, and
endearing memoir.”
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)
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“Moving, honest…Rich in detail and the history
of the northern English town of Accrington, Winterson’s narrative allows
readers to ponder, along with the author, the importance of feeling wanted and
loved.”
— Kirkus Reviews
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“Compelling, in fact, perhaps even more so when
compared to the fictionalized version written by Winterson as a
twenty-five-year-old. Then, passion and anger seemed to burn off the page…Now
comes [an] emotional excavation as a fifty-two-year-old looking back with a cooler,
more forgiving eye…The specifics of [Winterson’s] early abuse are vivid,
violent, and no less horrifying for their familiarity…If the memoir was begun
as a final exorcism of the monster mother, it ends with a moving acceptance of
her.”
— Independent (UK)
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“Clarion, courageous, and vividly expressive,
Winterson conducts a dramatic and revelatory inquiry into the forging of the
self and liberating power of literature.”
— Booklist (starred review)
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“Provides a vivid picture of the grotesque
behaviors of the lunatic mother she refers to as ‘Mrs. Winterson.’ This is a
detailed portrait of a life that saved itself. The hard work Winterson did to
find her place in the world after growing up as an outsider’s outsider is not
exaggerated. We are lucky she survived to tell the tale.”
— Library Journal (starred review)