Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson

This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win. We live today as courtiers once did in royal courts: we must appear civil while attempting to crush all those around us. The authors have created a sort of anti-Book of Virtues in this encyclopedic compendium of the ways and means of power.Įveryone wants power and everyone is in a constant duplicitous game to gain more power at the expense of others, according to Greene, a screenwriter and former editor at Esquire (Elffers, a book packager, designed the volume, with its attractive marginalia). 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.Ī moving, honest look at life as an abused adopted child. The search for her true identity and her birth mother helped bring her back from the darkness. Books and words brought comfort and led Winterson to Oxford and writing, but she descended into a deep depression when her lover left her. At age 16, she was kicked out of the house and forced to live in her car. When her secret stash of books was discovered and burned, Winterson rebelled by claiming she would write her own books one day. Winterson’s love, finding escape from her mood swings in the local public library, where she devoured a wide variety of literature. The author struggled with the ebb and flow of Mrs. Frequently locked out on the doorstep by her abusive, Pentecostal, adoptive mother or often told she was “a fault to heaven, a fault against the dead, and a fault to nature,” Winterson wondered if she had ever been wanted, by her biological or adoptive mother.

The author ponders her youth and examines how those challenging years changed and shaped her as an adult. Acclaimed novelist Winterson ( The Battle of the Sun, 2010, etc.) revisits her difficult childhood as an adoptee, chronicling the search for her biological mother.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson