Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

that was bad for the Pope.
    The book looked a bit short to me — mysteries are usually quite long — so I had a look and saw that it was written in verse. Definitely not right ... I had never heard of T. S. Eliot. I thought he might be related to George Eliot. The librarian told me he was an American poet who had lived in England for most of his life. He had died in 1964, and he had won the Nobel Prize.
    I wasn't reading poetry because my aim was to work my way through ENGLISH LITERATURE IN PROSE A—Z.
    But this was different . . .
    I read: This is one moment, / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy .
    I started to cry.
    Readers looked up reproachfully, and the librarian reprimanded me, because in those days you weren't even allowed to sneeze in a library, let alone weep. So I took the book outside and read it all the way through, sitting on the steps in the usual northern gale.
    The unfamiliar and beautiful play made things bearable that day, and the things it made bearable were another failed family — the first one was not my fault but all adopted children blame themselves. The second failure was definitely my fault.
    I was confused about sex and sexuality, and upset about the straightforward practical problems of where to live, what to eat, and how to do my A levels.

    I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot helped me.
    So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it is irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language — and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers — a language powerful enough to say how it is.
    It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
    In many ways it was time for me to go. The books had got the better of me, and my mother had got the better of the books.
    I used to work on the market on Saturdays, and after school on Thursdays and Fridays, packing up. I used the money to buy books. I smuggled them inside and hid them under the mattress.
    Anybody with a single bed, standard size, and a collection of paperbacks, standard size, will know that seventy—two per layer can be accommodated under the mattress. By degrees my bed began to rise visibly, like the Princess and the Pea, so that soon I was sleeping closer to the ceiling than to the floor.
    My mother was suspicious—minded, but even if she had not been, it was clear that her daughter was going up in the world.
    One night she came in and saw the corner of a paperback sticking out from under the mattress. She pulled it out and examined it with her flashlight. It was an unlucky choice; D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love .

    Mrs Winterson knew that Lawrence was a satanist and a pornographer, and hurling it out of the window, she rummaged and rifled and I came tumbling off the bed while she threw book after book out of the window and into the backyard. I was grabbing books and trying to hide them, the dog was running off with them, my dad was standing helpless in his pyjamas.
    When she had done, she picked up the little paraffin stove we used to heat the bathroom, went into the yard, poured paraffin over the books and set them on fire.
    I watched them blaze and blaze and remember thinking how warm it was, how light, on the freezing Saturnian January night. And books have always been light and warmth to me.
    I had bound them all in plastic because they were precious. Now they were gone.
    In the morning there were stray bits of texts all over the yard and in the alley. Burnt jigsaws of books. I collected some of the scraps.
    It is probably why I write as I do – collecting the scraps, uncertain of continuous narrative. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin . . .
    I was very quiet for a while, but I had realised something important: whatever is on the outside can be taken away at any time. Only what is inside you is safe.
    I began to memorise text. We had always memorised long chunks of the Bible, and it seems that people in oral traditions have better memories than those who rely on stored text.

    There was a time when record-keeping wasn’t an act of administration; it was an art form. The earliest poems were there to commemorate, to remember, across generations, whether a victory in battle, or the life