Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Jeanette Winterson recounts the history and geography of the place of her birth—Manchester, England, which is in the “south of the north” of the country. Jeanette describes the region as “untamed and unmetropolitan [but] connected and worldly.” As Manchester was “the world’s first industrial city”—and, until WWI, the place where 65% of the world’s cotton was processed—it was influential on industrial cities and towns the world over. Manchester was and is “all mix”—both radical and repressive, utilitarian and utopian. Manchester life in the late mid-1800s was difficult, grimy, and “raw,” and even Charles Dickens wrote of the plight of the working class there, describing factory workers and their children as “ragged [and] filthy horde[s].” The despicable conditions “pitched Manchester into radicalism.”

Jeanette argues that “where you are born stamps who you are.” Her birth mother was a factory worker and her adoptive father was a manual laborer—Jeanette’s history, both biological and adoptive, is the history of the working class. Jeanette “dreamed of escape” from an early age, and now as an adult she wonders what happens to society when individualism and escapism win out over community.

Jeanette describes the route between Manchester, where she was born, and the town of Accrington, where she was raised—the Pennines, a “wild rough low mountain range” is in view during the journey one might take between the two points, offering an “[un]easy beauty.” Jeanette describes the landscape as “taciturn [and] reluctant.”

Jeanette was born in August of 1959 and adopted on the 21st of January, 1960. Jeanette does not know—and “never will”—whether Mrs. Winterson was unable to have children or just unwilling to “put herself through the necessaries.”

Jeanette’s adoptive parents, the Wintersons, had purchased their home in 1947. Before they found religion, they smoked and drank—after they become Pentecostal Evangelicals, both quit drinking but continued smoking. Her mother smoked in secret, and allowed her husband only a few cigarettes a week, describing them as “his only pleasure.” Jeanette laments her father’s restricted and sexless life. 

Jeanette writes that she screamed nonstop until she was two years old. As child psychology “hadn’t reached Accrington,” her adoptive parents failed to realize that perhaps she was experiencing “the trauma of early separation from the love object that is the mother,” and instead proclaimed her a “Devil baby.” As a child, Jeanette was “very often full of rage and despair,” and her parents fought often—the battle between the three of them “was really the battle between happiness and unhappiness.” Jeanette turned to the Bible, which told her that even if she was unloved on Earth, “there was God in heaven” who loved her enormously. In spite of all the traumas of her childhood, Jeanette says, she “was and [is] in love with life.”

Mrs. Winterson, on the other hand, did not love life. She saw the only escape from her misery as the Apocalypse. She kept her War Cupboard, full of emergency supplies, intact, planning to use it as a bunker when the end of the world arrived. Mrs. Winterson told Jeanette that an angel would come to collect them, and Jeanette realized that her mother’s mind was totally occupied with “elaborate interpretations” of the Apocalypse and its aftermath. Jeanette writes that she and her mother had both lost things in life, and were “matched” in their feeling of being “dislodged” and wanting to go “Home.”

Jeanette writes that she was “excited” about the Apocalypse as a child, but “secretly hoped” that she would live to adulthood in order to see what the world had to offer her. She reflects on her lifelong goal of pursuing happiness, and describes the right to the pursuit of happiness as “the right to swim upstream, salmon-wise.” Jeanette believes that the pursuit of happiness is not the same thing as being happy, and that happy times will always pass. Pursuing happiness, however, is a “quest stor[y]” which is “life-long and not goal-centered.”