If The Sun Is Shining, Stand In It
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson is, unflinchingly and categorically, my favourite book. It’s a big statement to make—especially considering I’ve loved so much of what I’ve read—but it’s true. Some years ago a friend bought me a copy from the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore in Paris and I read it with a hunger, a knowing, and a wonder that I had not experienced before (and have not since). It felt like a return but also a voyage, and I guess all great journeys have that element to them: here is something familiar in the unfamiliar, something you know even when you don’t know. A few years later, driven by my desire to share its power and grace, I lent the book to another friend who (tragically) misplaced it, and I grieved its loss so deeply. It took me a long while before I felt ready to replace my original Winterson; it didn’t feel right buying a new copy, leaving the version I had grown into/around/with to languish somewhere in the world. I didn’t want to pour myself into a text so clean, so uninhabited—pages not marked, spine not cracked. I think some books must be lived in. In the end I settled for a second hand copy because I found relief in the fact that it had a life before me1; that someone else might have also sobbed through it like I did, fervently highlighting, underlining, and dog-earing the bits that were familiar, unbelievable, visceral.
I really mean it when I say this book saved my life.
Recently I re-read it, not because I felt anything remotely close to dying and/or losing my mind, but because I found myself asking the exact question that is the title. Why Be Happy—as an experience, a concept, and chunks of text I’ve memorised—is always somewhere on my brain, but it’s been so imbricated with my consciousness that sometimes I forget it tangibly exists. And so, a couple of weeks ago, when I found myself squarely at a point where circumstances dictated that I should have been happy but I simply wasn’t, the book re-presented itself to me like a divinely timed apparition; a surprise I knew was coming but managed to startle me anyway. My relationship with the materiality of the book has sort of been a metaphor for what the book is about—loving, losing, letting go, starting again, chasing, releasing, pursuing, being—and it is one of the greatest gifts I have ever received.
I love the title because it doesn’t sound like what it is. It’s part sequel, part prequel, part rewrite of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (my actual first Winterson read), but it is not the whole story, which both intrigues and comforts me. There is something so inexplicable about the autobiographical or the confessional—we can never have the whole truth, even in private, and where you cannot have the truth you can have a story. Most times the truth is in fact a story, because fact and fiction are always bound2.
Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open—the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
Jeanette is the protagonist in Oranges, which is technically a story (“if it is a story, why is the main character called Jeanette?”), and Jeanette Winterson is the protagonist and narrator in Why Be Happy, which is technically an autobiography after Oranges. Jeanette (Winterson) leaves home because she is in love with a woman. Mrs Winterson is upset about this because they are a God-fearing English Pentecostal family. She asks Jeanette ‘why are you doing this?’ to which Jeanette responds ‘because it makes me happy’ and finally, after a pause Jeanette briefly thinks might be understanding, Mrs Winterson says ‘why be happy when you could be normal?’. Jeanette leaves and does not return.
I don't actually think the story is about happiness (as a state, a pursuit, an im/possibility etc), which Winterson says is “fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine”. I think the story is about madness and being brave. I never quite understood the use of bovine there and I think that’s why I like it so much. I’ve been trained to parse text and read for (deeper) meaning, but sometimes you don’t find it. Sometimes it doesn’t matter. It’s about chaos as the most essential process—“going mad is the beginning”—at a point in time/history where madness is so terrifying that the only way to approach it is medication, sedation, institutionalisation. I have a friend who says “it’s a madness” about almost everything and I know it’s a turn of phrase but honestly, I think she’s right.
There is a link I want to make between madness and rootedness but first some context is necessary. Below is a very long bit from Why Be Happy about feeling all feelings3.
Mostly we do our best to stifle life—to be tame or to be wanton. To be tranquillised or raging. Extremes have the same effect; they insulate us from the intensity of life.
And extremes—whether of dullness or fury—successfully prevent feeling. I know our feelings can be so unbearable that we employ ingenious strategies—unconscious strategies—to keep those feelings away. We do a feelings-swap, where we avoid feeling sad or lonely or afraid or inadequate, and feel angry instead. It can work the other way, too—sometimes you do need to feel angry, not inadequate; sometimes you do need to feel love and acceptance, and not the tragic drama of your life.
It takes courage to feel the feeling—and not trade it on the feelings-exchange, or even transfer it altogether to another person. You know how in couples one person is always doing the weeping or the raging while the other one seems so calm and reasonable?
I understood that feelings were difficult for me although I was overwhelmed by them.
Madness is a socialised, perceived extreme. It’s the God forbid; the end no one wants to reach. But my experience with madness hasn’t been all or nothing—it’s been all and nothing. I think it was Angela Davis who said radical means ‘grasping things at the root’ as opposed to an extreme (which is how it is usually used), and so I wonder what would happen if we applied that same principle to madness. Maybe we would then be able to see madness and chaos as the essence of nature—as the beginning instead of the end; as movements that can bring us where we need to be. It reminds me a great deal of Emergent Strategy by Adrienne Maree Brown, which was one of the first few books I read when I began organising more formally in the migrant justice space. It helped me to conceptualise two big things that I think encapsulate a lot of political but also intimate life: harm and change. Brown traces emergence as sort of that process of arriving at the root of all that seems unattainable: sanity, happiness, the opportunity to live life on your own terms. It is “interdependence, iteration, [and] being in relationship with constantly changing conditions, fractals”.
I find so much relief in the idea that we are adaptable creatures; that we are always evolving. It’s really what allows us to move forward from harm—the kind we inflict, the kind inflicted on us, and the kind we witness. A deep, almost delusional belief in the capacity for change and chances has been a necessary part of my survival—“The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance”. It is how I have cultivated and continue to tend to my desire for regeneration, space, love, and abundance within a society that is inherently destructive; whose destructive tendencies have also created me and inform a part of who I am. How do we move forward and rebuild when there has not yet been accountability? When those who have caused harm continue to be both uplifted and hidden by the powers that be? How do we forgive/love them? It’s a madness.
When I told another friend about Why Be Happy he asked if it gave me hope. Then he asked if hope was/is necessary for renewal. I like the second question a lot, because it untethers you from the ending you will inevitably find yourself at no matter how you answer the first. When there is no prerequisite for renewal we can start at any point, with whatever tools we have, however we are. Change is possible, chaos is essential, and there is always time for the right work.
As I was writing this piece I found a list I had made on 5 April 2022 containing all the things I had learned, up to that point, from all my years of therapy. Re-reading it now I realise so much of it is contained in what I have also already written here, which surprises me but really shouldn’t.
Feel all feelings
Trust your gut
Be clear about what you want love to look and feel like
Tune in to natural processes and be humbled by them
You cannot fail at your body’s most fundamental work—breathing, feeling
Even when you start again you are never starting from the beginning
Not all things have purpose: you can let go, take a break
Kindness eases change
Our bodies are naturally oriented towards healing
It is sometimes necessary to be silent; to permit yourself and others the space to think and make sense of; to feel confused and to disagree
There are true loves that don’t lead to sexual pleasure, committed bonding, sustained contact, romance etc. and they are just as transformative (bell hooks, loosely)
Discomfort is the root of all growing and learning
Movements built on clarity and intention are stronger than movements built on hope, in reaction to oppression
All existence is fractal
Guilt and shame are limited motivations for anything
Walter Benjamin talked about the ‘aura’ in art, and how it diminishes when the work is reproduced on large scales. I find that things like sharing, bequeathing, and/or communal owning can somewhat displace this because it fosters a connectivity across space and time that allows for the creation of new, cumulative auras.
I find categories like these to be both unconstructive and elusive and there is much to be said about the broader politics of genre but I will open that can of worms at a different time.