The prose is breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty and vigorous all at once. She defines the pursuit of happiness not as being content (which is 'fleeting' and 'a bit bovine'), but as the impulse to 'swim upstream', the search for a meaningful life. This breathless, powerful book is that search
Emily Strokes, Financial Times

Vivid, unpredictable, and sometimes mind-rattling memoir... This book... which had been funny enough to make me laugh out loud more times than is advisable on the No 12 bus - turns into something raw and unnerving
Julie Myerson, Observer

Vivid, unpredictable, and sometimes mind-rattling memoir... This book... which had been funny enough to make me laugh out loud more times than is advisable on the No 12 bus - turns into something raw and unnerving.
Julie Myerson, The Observer

This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read... but it wriggles with humour... At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears. There is much here that is impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one's sympathy, for everyone involved
Zoe Williams, Guardian

This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read... but it wriggles with humour... At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears. There is much here that is impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one's sympathy, for everyone involved.
Zoe Williams, The Guardian

In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett... This remarkable account is, among other things, a powerful argument for reading... This memoir is brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and generous one
Spectator

Both inspiring and appalling, its cruellest details only made digestible by the restrained elegance of Winterson's prose
Independent on Sunday

In the 26 years since the publication of her highly acclaimed first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Jeanette Winterson has proved herself a writer of startling invention, originality and style. Her combination of the magical and the earthy, the rapturous and the matter-of-fact, is unique. It is a strange and felicitous gift, as if the best of Gabriel Garcia Marquez was combined with the best of Alan Bennett... This remarkable account is, among other things, a powerful argument for reading... This memoir is brave and beautiful, a testament to the forces of intelligence, heart and imagination. It is a marvellous book and generous one.
Cressida Connolly, The Speactator

An essential new book... she is a natural memoirist. The first half is a mature retelling of her masterwork, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit... The second half is a wry, urgent account of her hunt for her birth mother... Pressed on by the need for self discovery, the prose doesn't miss a beat... it feels risky and alive
Evening Standard

A dazzling autobiography, this is a love letter to literature as a means to survive
GQ

While Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is rich in autobiographical detail, it is a wide and bold an experiment in the memoir form as any so far written... in writing that is astonishingly naked and brave, Winterson reveals the legacy of that difficult and painful childhood... Much of this book is laugh-out-loud funny... Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is proudly, and sometimes painfully, honest.It is also, arguably, the finest and most hopeful memoir to emerge in many years and, as such, it should not be missed
John Burnside, The Times

It is clear from the first page of this shattering, brilliant memoir that the black humour of Oranges was there to disguise the true awfulness of her childhood. If things were bad in Winterson's fictional world, the reality was much, much worse... There is a sense at the end of this brave, funny, heartbreaking book that Winterson has somehow reconciled herself to her past... Her childhood was ghastly, as bad as Dickens's stint in the blacking factory, but it was also the crucible for her incendiary talent
Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times

Boasts everything that she does best: courage, ferocity and prose that soars
Julie Myerson, New Statesman, Books of the Year

In memoir, honesty matters more than anything but, when married with humour, wit and elan vital of Jeanette Winterson's [book], it is a transformative force
John Burnside, New Statesman, Books of the Year

The specifics of her early abuse is vivid, violent, and no less horrifying for its familiarity... If the memoir was begun as a final exorcism of the monster mother, it ends with a moving acceptance of her
Independent

Moved me deeply. [It] celebrates the redeeming power of the written word and is undercut with an irresistible humour born of residence in hardship
Juliet Nicholson, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

An extraordinary tragic-comic literary autobiography
Mark Lawson, Guardian, Books of the Year

There is something darkly Dickensian in the urgency and energy of her character and quest, in the acute, abrupt style of her self-presentation and in the extreme characters who have informed her life
The Times

Funny and scary mixed together, in the manner of the Brothers Grimm, sharp as a knife, round as a child's eye
Daily Telegraph

Difficult, spirited, engaging... a resonant affirmation of the power of storytelling to make things better
Jane Shilling, Daily Mail

Moving, turbulent
Zoe Williams, Guardian

Shattering, brilliant memoir... Here childhood eas ghastly, as bad as Dickens's stint in the blacking factory, but it was also the crucible for her incendiary talent
Daisy Goodwin, Sunday Times

Verbalyl dazzling, emotionally searing, compassionate and often hilarious memoir
Genevieve Fox, Daily Mail