Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’

Jeanette Winterson’s “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit” (1985), written when she was 24, won the Whitbread prize for a first novel in Britain and marked her as a raw and devious talent.

That novel, about a girl who is adopted by Pentecostal parents and discovers she is sexually attracted to women, was partly autobiographical. About one of that unusual novel’s characters, who represents the author, she declares: “She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.”

The essential point of Ms. Winterson’s singular and electric new memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” however, is that she didn’t find a boat. None were waiting for her. She built one for herself.

Words were Ms. Winterson’s ticket out of a sadistically grim childhood. By the time she was a teenager, she says, “I knew how words worked in the way that some boys knew how engines worked.” She arrived to study at Oxford with lit dirt under her fingernails.

“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” is raucous. It hums with a dark refulgence from its first pages. It also caps a comeback of sorts for Ms. Winterson, whose work in the 1990s was frequently pretentious and solipsistic and reflexively pounded by critics.

During that period she became more famous for her off-page antics: hogging the stage at readings, declaring herself her favorite author, ambushing the writer of a profile in the British newspaper The Observer at that writer’s home. This made her lively copy; none of it shored the ruins of her prose.

The memoir’s title is the question Ms. Winterson’s adoptive mother asked after discovering her daughter was a lesbian. This sentence carries a large freight of irony because Ms. Winterson, in this book, seems nearly incapable of happiness, and suspicious of it as well. She finds it to be “fleeting, dependent on circumstances, and a bit bovine.”

Ms. Winterson grew up in working-class Accrington, 20 miles north of Manchester. Her adoptive father worked on road crews and shoveled coal at night for a power station. His absence was his presence.

Ms. Winterson’s mother loomed over her life, as she looms over this book. In a quiet way she is one of the great horror mothers of English-language literature. Here is how Ms. Winterson introduces her on Page 1:

“She was a flamboyant depressive; a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, and the bullets in a tin of Pledge. A woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father. A woman with a prolapse, a thyroid condition, an enlarged heart, an ulcerated leg that never healed, and two sets of false teeth — matte for everyday, and a pearlized set for ‘best.’ ”

Ms. Winterson’s mother often locked her in a coal bin, or outside the house all night. She burned her books. When she was angry with Ms. Winterson, she would say, “The Devil led us to the wrong crib.” She made it clear to the author that she was not wanted.

In certain ways the young Ms. Winterson was a bit demonic. She screamed a lot. She was a brawler and, as she puts it, “too spiky, too angry, too intense, too odd.” She describes herself this way: “A burping, spraying, sprawling fecal thing blasting the house with rude life.” Not Rosemary’s baby, but not a teddy bear, either.

The arc of this memoir’s narrative breaks into three paths. One is Ms. Winterson’s search for her birth mother: a good story I’d rather not give away, except to say that it will not soon be made into a Hallmark television movie. The second is Ms. Winterson’s self-invention, her intellectual coming of age. The third is her rather delighted discovery that she likes to be naked with other women.

The device of the trapped young person saved by books is a hoary one, but Ms. Winterson makes it seem new, and sulfurous. As a child she began to haunt a local library and decided to read English literature A through Z. Thank God, she says, for Jane Austen right at the start. She didn’t stumble until she hit the letter N. About Nabokov, she told a teacher, “He hates women.” She calls this awareness the beginning of her feminism.

Her class politics infuse her awareness of how she escaped Accrington. “When people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn’t be read at school because it is irrelevant,” she says, “I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is.”

The other thing a working-class kid learns about the life of the mind, she says, is this: “Whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.”

Her sexual coming of age is often very funny. She writes about an illness that briefly ruined her hearing: “It was very bad for me that my deafness happened at around the same time as I discovered my clitoris.”

Ms. Winterson threw herself headlong into relationships. “I never did drugs, I did love — the reckless kind, more damage than healing, more heartbreak than health,” she writes. A kind of rage filled the other areas of her life too. “There are people who could never commit murder,” she says. “I am not one of those people.”

This memoir takes her through her improbable acceptance to and graduation from Oxford University and covers a bit of her career as a writer. But it’s the squalling young Ms. Winterson who presides over this book. Her life with her adoptive parents was often appalling, but it made her the writer she is.

“She was a monster,” Ms. Winterson writes about her mother, “but she was my monster.”