Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?
Signed and Annotated
—
“I had to write my own bible. The other one had been a problem”
Winterson, Jeannette. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. London…: Pandora Press, (1985).
8vo.; wrappers.
Together with:
Winterson, Jeannette. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? London: Jonathan Cape, (2001).
8vo.; cloth; dust-jacket.
First editions (fourth printing of the later title) of Winterson’s seminal memoir and recent retrospective analysis of same. Each is annotated throughout by Winterson, who comments on source material, memories, reflections, and revelations of liberties taken in the earlier of the two volumes. Topics covered include the editorial process, publication history, identification of individuals, quotes and misquotes, poverty, the writing life, and more. Oranges sees her hand on three dozen pages, on which she leaves nearly a thousand words – though most of those appear on the seven blanks in the rear. In part:
Very excited by these endpapers. The end of a story should suggest the start of the next one. I come from Lancashire – the looms. I feel I break the thread & tie it again. Thee is a length of cloth – the book – but when the thread is cut, like Atropos cuts it, it begins again. Another cloth. And then that Yeats poem . the cloth of Heaver jumps at me. / And then that moment Leonard Woolf writes about, after Virginia’s death…
She added approximately two hundred and fifty words on nearly two dozen pages to Why Be Happy…? For instance:
I sat down to write this book not knowing it was a book. It was a way of asking myself the Pontius Pilate question What is truth? And that must include our own past which cannot be understood as a fact but is a narrative read in varying inter[ ] of light.
(#4656258 and #4656259)
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