“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”: Portrait of the artist as a young Pentecostal

Sun, 26 Feb 2012 22:01:00 +0000

When Jeanette Winterson was a child -- a redheaded scrap of a thing, as fierce and self-willed as Jane Eyre but readier with her fists -- she went to a school concert at Christmastime with her parents. "Is that your mum?" someone asked her. "Mostly," was her reply.

Winterson was adopted, raised by evangelical Pentecostals in a working-class town in northern England in the 1960s and '70s. Her family's house had no phone, no indoor toilet, intermittent heat and electricity and not quite enough food. Of the six books allowed on the premises, three were either the Bible or Bible commentaries. To the dismay of her mother, Winterson turned out to be brilliant, literary, defiant and gay.

As a young writer, winning the Whitbread Prize for First Novel in 1985, making Granta's 1993 list of the best young British novelists (along with Kazuo Ishiguro and Alan Hollinghurst), Winterson burned bright, using her childhood and her rebellious sexuality as fuel. "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit" was her autobiographical coming-of-age novel, funny and harrowing. The two books that followed, "The Passion" and "Sexing the Cherry," retained much of the escape velocity that got Winterson out of Accrington, Lancashire, and into Oxford and the London literary world. The ones after that were less successful, thematically diffuse grab bags of big ideas with story lines that tend to wander off into the tall grass and stall. Many fans lost interest. As badly as Winterson needed to break free of her youth, its constraints gave form and focus to her intensity.

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“Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?”: Portrait of the artist as a young Pentecostal