Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Title: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Author: Jeanette Winterson
Pub Date: 2012
Genre: Memoir
Nutshell: Award-winning author Jeanette Winterson writes about her memories of growing up adopted and gay in a religious household and coming to terms with both of those truths as she grows up

This book's title is something Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother actually said to her one evening as Jeanette was leaving home, after trying once again to explain why, exactly, she wanted to date other girls. She never got through to her ultra-religious mother, who preferred to take her life lessons from the Old Testament and Revelations, and who was probably more than a little mentally unbalanced. To say Winterson's childhood was harrowing at times is an understatement, and that she came out of it even as well-adjusted as she did is a minor miracle. 

This memoir is in some ways the true story behind Winterson's first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was a fairly fictionalized account of her upbringing and eventual coming out story. She says in this book that Oranges, as bizarre and bleak as it was, was in many ways more wishful and happier than the truth, because she couldn't yet deal with the real truth at the time. 

Why Be Happy bounces back and forth between two eras in Winterson's life.  The first is her childhood in Lancashire, which includes her unstable mother, her silent father, her religious life, her surreptitious trips to the library in order to read the books her mother bans from the house, and her eventual romances with neighborhood girls.  The second is her adulthood, after she leaves home to attend Oxford and eventually moves to London, where she continues to attempt to make peace with her adoption, her upbringing, and her parents. She also decides to track down her birth mother, which unleashes more trauma and grief than she bargains for. 

This was a good example of a memoir done well by an interesting author who definitely has a tale to tell. Her story continues to be one of hope and fighting past the odds, and also about the importance of owning your past, no matter how painful. 

Every Last One

Title: Every Last One
Author: Anna Quindlen
Pub Date: 2010
Genre: Fiction
Nutshell: A woman, her family, and what happens to her after something awful occurs

No spoilers, but if you can't figure out that something bad happens at some point in this book, we need to talk about your reading comprehension skills. It's mentioned on the book jacket. The only surprising thing for me was the exact nature of what happened and how long it took to happen. I don't necessarily think this was a failure on the author's part -- a failure of Foreshadowing 101 or anything, but it did get to be a bit grinding by the time the denouement finally occurred. You know from the book jacket that something bad is going to happen, and then within the first few chapters, you would get that sense even if you weren't the type that reads book jackets. And then it just keeps going. There's a Sword of Damocles hanging over the entire thing that nobody seems to see except the reader, and for me it just got wearisome. I don't know if it would have helped not saying anything about it on the book jacket and just letting you kind of read for yourself with no expectations, but it becomes pretty obvious pretty quickly that something is not right and, already provided with the information that something is going to happen, you're kind of set up with the expectation. 

So I don't know whose fault that was, but it kind of soured this whole experience for me. I never really felt connected with any of the characters--I couldn't even keep secondary character names straight, and there's not that many. I couldn't find anyone necessarily to really like or hang on to. Maybe that wasn't the point. Everyone is believable enough as real people. The writing is good. I just never fell into this book the way I do with something I really connect with. This was just something I read and said, "Okay, that was technically proficient and I didn't hate it." Maybe others will have better luck.

Plotwise, this is the story of a wife and mother who has three teenage children. The children have friends, the couple has friends and jobs, everything is fine, until one night everything becomes very much not fine, and then the rest of the book is the main character navigating the wreckage left behind. That's all I'll give you, because that much more or less exists everywhere including the book descriptions on Goodreads and Amazon.