Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Smart, perceptive, ferocious, and joyous, Why Be Joyful When You Could Be Ordinary? is a tenacious quest for a mother, a place to call home, love, and belonging.

Through her works, Jeanette Winterson has become a well-known personality in international literature. Her debut book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which tells the narrative of a little girl adopted by Pentecostal parents and is now often mandatory reading in modern literature, is one of the most acclaimed works of the last several decades.

When you could be normal, why not be happy? is a memoir on the quest for happiness throughout life. It's a book full of stories: about a girl who gets locked out of her house and spends the entire night sitting on the doorstep; about a religious fanatic who poses as a mother and waits for Armageddon with a revolver in the dresser; about growing up in an industrial town in north England that has changed beyond recognition; and about the universe as a cosmic dustbin.

It is the tale of how Jeanette's tragic past, which she thought she had erased and repainted, came back to haunt her and set her on a quest for her biological mother that led her both into lunacy and back out again.