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

This is the funniest sad book I have ever read. Winterson’s mother — always referred to as Mrs. Winterson — was an abusive, cigarette-smoking, Pentecostal giantess who never let her adopted daughter forget that she was taken from “the wrong crib.” Despite a childhood filled with apocalyptic pronouncements and terrifying mistreatment, Winterson emerges as a writer of startling self-awareness, humor, and empathy for the unhappy woman who made her life miserable. Less a life history than an exploration of a life in process, Why Be Happy captures the writer in her 50s, still trying to figure out how to love and be loved in the absence of a maternal model.

— Rhianna

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