Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

or anybody? Why should a woman not be ambitious for literature? Ambitious for herself?
    Mrs Winterson was having none of it. She knew full well that writers were sex—crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work. Books had been forbidden in our house — I'll explain why later — and so for me to have written one, and had it published, and had it win a prize . . . and be standing in a phone box giving her a lecture on literature, a polemic on feminism . . .
    The pips — more money in the slot — and I'm thinking, as her voice goes in and out like the sea, ‘Why aren't you proud of me?’
    The pips — more money in the slot — and I'm locked out and sitting on the doorstep again. It's really cold and I've got a newspaper under my bum and I'm huddled in my duffel coat.
    A woman comes by and I know her. She gives me a bag of chips. She knows what my mother is like.
    Inside our house the light is on. Dad's on the night shift, so she can go to bed, but she won't sleep. She'll read the Bible all night, and when Dad comes home, he'll let me in, and he'll say nothing, and she'll say nothing, and we'll act like it's normal to leave your kid outside all night, and normal never to sleep with your husband. And normal to have two sets of false teeth, and a revolver in the duster drawer . . .
    We're still on the phone in our phone boxes. She tells me that my success is from the Devil, keeper of the wrong crib. She confronts me with the fact that I have used my own name in the novel — if it is a story, why is the main character called Jeanette?
    Why?
    I can't remember a time when I wasn't setting my story against hers. It was my survival from the very beginning. Adopted children are self—invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.
    The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story — of course that is how we all live, it's the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It's like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It's like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you — and it can't, and it shouldn't, because something is missing.
    That isn't of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.
    There are markings here, raised like welts. Read them. Read the hurt. Rewrite them. Rewrite the hurt.
    It's why I am a writer — I don't say ‘decided’ to be, or ‘became’. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson's story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
    She said, ‘But it's not true . . .’
    Truth? This was a woman who explained the flash—dash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm.
    There was a terraced house in Accrington, in Lancashire — we called those houses two—up two—down: two rooms downstairs, two rooms upstairs. Three of us lived together in that house for sixteen years. I told my version — faithful and invented, accurate and misremembered, shuffled in time. I told myself as hero like any shipwreck story. It was a shipwreck, and me thrown on the coastline of humankind, and finding it not altogether human, and rarely kind.
    And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges , is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.
    I am often asked, in a tick—box kind of way, what is ‘true’ and what is not ‘true’ in Oranges . Did I work in a funeral parlour? Did I drive an ice—cream van? Did we have a Gospel Tent? Did Mrs Winterson build her own CB radio? Did she really stun tomcats with a catapult?
    I can't answer these questions. I can say that there is a character in Oranges called Testifying Elsie who looks after the little Jeanette and acts as a soft wall against the hurt(ling) force of Mother.
    I wrote her in because I couldn't bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I really