Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: Chapter 1 Summary & Analysis

Jeanette Winterson describes her adoptive mother, Mrs. Winterson, as a “flamboyant depressive.” She says that Mrs. Winterson was often angry with her when she was a child and frequently told Jeanette that the Devil had led her and her husband, Mr. Winterson, to “the wrong crib” when they adopted her. Jeanette writes that her mother kept a revolver with the cleaning supplies, stayed up all night to avoid sleeping in the same bed as her husband, and kept two sets of false teeth—everyday and “best” teeth.

Jeanette does not know why her mother could not have children. Jeanette believes she was adopted just because Mrs. Winterson wanted a friend. “I was a way of saying that she was here,” Jeanette writes.

Jeanette describes the plot of her first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was published in 1985, as being “semi-autobiographical in that it tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents [who is] supposed to grow up and be a missionary [but] instead falls in love with a woman.” The first line of the novel reads: “Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle.” Jeanette describes herself as a “bare-knuckle fighter” who was beaten as a child but “learned never to cry.” She was often locked out overnight, and was forced to walk five miles a day to school and to church.  

Jeanette recalls the “furious” letter her mother sent her upon the publication of Oranges in which she demanded a phone call. Jeanette, who hadn’t seen her mother in years, went to a phone booth in order to make the call, and pictured her mother far away in Accrington also sitting in a phone booth—her tall, nearly two-hundred-pound mother would have been dressed in a headscarf and light makeup and would have “filled the phone box.” She was, Jeanette recalls, “larger than life.” On the phone, Jeanette tried to explain the book to Mrs. Winterson, who complained she’d had to order the novel under a fake name in order to avoid embarrassment. A tone sounding through the receiver told Jeanette to put more money in the coin slot in order to continue the call, and this reminded her of getting locked out on the doorstep of her childhood home. Mrs. Winterson told Jeanette that any success she’d had because of the book was “from the Devil,” and asked why, if the story was fiction, would Jeanette have chosen to also name the main character Jeanette. 

Jeanette states that “adopted children are self-invented because we have to be,” and her whole life has been the process of “setting [her] story against [her mother’s.]” As Mrs. Winterson continued on the phone to question her about the “truth” of the book, Jeanette considered—and considers still in the present day—the fact that the version of her life that appears in Oranges is a less-painful story than the truth of her life. It is a version of her story she could “survive,” and that things were “much lonelier” in real life than they were for the Jeanette of the novel.

Jeanette recalls the friends she made in school, and the cruel ways she severed those friendships. Because she was adopted, and “adoption is outside,” she often found herself “act[ing] out what it feels like to be the one who doesn’t belong.” She writes that it was “impossible to believe that anyone [could] love [her] for [her]self.”

Jeanette continues to meditate on truth as she remembers the phone call with Mrs. Winterson. Her mother “objected to what [Jeanette] had put in” the book, but Jeanette feels that what she left out “says just as much.” What she had left out of her novel was the story’s “silent twin.” She has turned to fiction as a way to stop herself from being silenced—what her mother always wanted her to be. “Unhappy families,” Winterson writes, “are conspiracies of silence, [and] the one who breaks the silence is never forgiven.”

Though God, for many, is forgiveness, Jeanette writes that the God of her mother’s house was the Old Testament God, and “there was no forgiveness without a great deal of sacrifice.” Her mother was unhappy and waiting for the Apocalypse—her mother saw her life as a “Vale of Tears, a pre-death experience.” Mrs. Winterson prayed for death “every day,” which Jeanette comically proclaims was “hard on [her] and [her] dad.”

When Jeanette was naughty as a child, her mother told her the story of the Devil and the crib: there had been a little boy in the crib next to Jeanette when Mr. and Mrs. Winterson had adopted her, and his name had been Paul. Paul was the paragon of goodness against which Jeanette was always held up.

Jeanette recalls a memory in which she is gardening with her grandfather. She wears a cowboy outfit—her favorite outfit—and a strange woman comes up to the garden gate. Jeanette’s grandfather tells her to go inside and find Mrs. Winterson. Mrs. Winterson and the woman argue terribly at the front door, and Jeanette senses that both women feel “animal fear.” Once the woman leaves, Jeanette asks whether the woman who came to the door was her real mother, and Mrs. Winterson hits her so hard she falls to the ground. When Jeanette returns to the garden, her grandfather is working peacefully.