书名：Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?我要快乐，不必正常
作者：Jeanette Winterson
出版社名称：Vintage
出版时间：2012
语种：英文
ISBN：9780099556091
商品尺寸：12.9 x 1.5 x 19.8 cm
包装：平装
页数：240（以实物为准）
★本书获兰姆达文学奖
★入选《卫报》、《环球邮报》年度好书
★入选《纽约时报》年度重点推荐图书
★作者为大英帝国勋章获得者，被评为“BBC 100位杰出女性”

本书Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?《我要快乐，不必正常》是《橘子不是唯一的水果》作者珍妮特·温特森的自传：生命不只是一支从子宫飞往坟墓的时间之箭；照自己的意愿活得头破血流，也好过听从别人的安排，虚张声势地过浅薄生活。

25岁时，珍妮特·温特森用《橘子》一鸣惊人；52岁时，她回访过往的伤痛，书写自传《我要快乐，不必正常》。阅读这本书，你会发现，《橘子》中不动声色的幽默，其实是作家真实伤痛的保护色，如果说温特森的小说中发生了什么挫折和不幸，相对应的现实只会更坏、更糟……温特森开放且坦诚地剖析自己的经历和感受；受伤的童年往事、压抑痛苦的少年生活，是之后的人生中走不出的阴影，也意味着磨砺和成就自我的可能。

正如《泰晤士报》中所说：“也许她曾经有机会可以既快乐又正常，但那就不是珍妮特·温特森了。”温特森走出创伤的阴影，用勇气、爱与写作锻造并成就自我，正如温特森在书中所说：“无论多么贫乏，仍要爱生活，无论怎样寻找爱，也要爱自己。不是用自我为中心的方式，那将会与生活和爱背道而驰，而是以鲑鱼一般的决心逆流而上，无论水流多么汹涌，因为这是你的河流。”这是一本感人至深的回忆录，一本充满勇气与力量的成长之书，更是一本充满启发性和智慧的人生之书。

媒体评论：
“像刀一样锋利，像孩子的眼睛一样纯粹。”——《每日电讯报》

“也许她曾经有机会可以既快乐又正常，但那就不是珍妮特·温特森了。”——《星期日泰晤士报》

“一本区别于传统自传的回忆之书，一本和《橘子不是唯一的水果》一样充满力量的成长之书。”——《纽约时报书评》

“这是我读过的温特森书中尤为感人的一本……某一刻我哭得情难自禁。这本书里有太多令人印象深刻的内容，而我觉得特别不同寻常的一点是，这本书能加深读者的同理心，因为我们每个人都或多或少有过相似境遇。”——《卫报》

“一本光芒四射的自传，一封写给作为救赎的文学的情书。”——英国GQ

The shocking, heart-breaking - and often very funny - true story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette's version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story's the silent twin. It is full of hurt and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, about lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.

Review
"Unforgettable… It’s the best book I have ever read about the cost of growing up." (Daisy Goodwin Sunday Times)

"A searingly felt and expressed autobiography…Funny and profoundly hopeful – a tale of survival"(Kate Hamer Metro)

"This book is good, sensible, beautiful company… Try this"(A.L. Kennedy Week)

"Jeanette Winterson’s writing is poetic, emotive and beautiful"(So Many Books So Little Time (blog))

"Incredibly moving and full of Winterson’s characteristic wit." (Elle)
我在家里住了16年，父亲不在工厂轮班，就在教堂。母亲整夜醒着，终日抑郁。我上学，去教堂，跑进山间，秘密地读书。我自幼便学会隐蔽。藏匿我的心。掩饰我的想法。

我母亲不热爱生活。她不信有任何事会使生活变得更好。她曾对我说，宇宙是一个浩瀚的垃圾桶。我想了一会儿之后，问她桶盖是关着还是开着。

“关着的，”她说，“没人逃得了。”

我就是没法活在一个合上盖子的浩瀚的垃圾桶里。
珍妮特·温特森，英国当代作家。1959年8月出生，自小由笃信基督教的家庭收养，16岁时出走，此后靠在殡仪馆、精神病院等地兼职完成了在牛津大学的学业。1985年，处女作《橘子不是唯一的水果》出版，获英国惠特布莱德小说首作大奖，赢得国际声誉。2011年，出版自传《我要快乐，不必正常》。2016年，温特森入选“BBC 100位杰出女性”名单。代表作品有《写在身体上》、《给樱桃以性别》等。

Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester and read English at Oxford, during which time she wrote her first novel, the Whitbread award winning Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit. Tanglewreck, Jeanette's first novel for children, was published to great critical acclaim in 2006. In the same year she was awarded an OBE for services to literature.
WHEN MY MOTHER WAS ANGRY with me, which was often, she said,' The Devil led us to the wrong crib.'

The image of Satan taking time off from the Cold War and McCarthyism to visit Manchester in 1960 -- purpose of visit: to deceive Mrs Winterson -- has a flamboyant theatricality to it. 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 teethmatt for everyday, and a pearlised set for ' best'.

I do not know why she didn't/couldn't have children. I know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend (she had none), and because I was like a flare sent out into the world-a way of saying that she was here-a kind of X Marks the Spot.

She hated being a nobody, and like all children, adopted or not, I have had to live out some of her unlived life. We do that for our parents-we don't really have any choice.

She was alive when my first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published in 1985. It is semi-autobiographical, in that it tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents. The girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary. Instead she falls in love with a woman. Disaster. The girl leaves home, gets herself to Oxford University, returns home to find her mother has built a broadcast radio and is beaming out the Gospel to the heathen. The mother has a handle

-she's called ' Kindly Light'.

The novel begins:' Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father:. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to urestle.'

For most of my life I’ve been a bare-knuckle fighter. The one who wins is the one who hits the hardest. I was beaten as a child and I learned early never to cry. If I was locked out overnight I sat on the doorstep till the milkman came, drank both pints, left the empty bottles to enrage my mother, and walked to school.

We always walked. We had no car and no bus money. For me, the average was five miles a day: two miles for the round trip to school; three miles for the round trip to church.

Church was every night except Thursdays.

I wrote about some of these things in Oranges, and when it was published, my mother sent me a furious note in her immaculate copperplate handwriting demanding a phone call.