Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

Romance was just given a pink strip and all Romance was simply chucked unalphabetically onto the Romance shelves. Sea Stories were treated the same way, but with a green strip. Horror had a black strip. Mystery stories shlock-style had a white strip, but the librarian would never file Chandler or Highsmith under Mystery – they were literature, just as Moby-Dick was not a Sea Story and Jane Eyre was not Romance.
    Humour had a section too . . . with a wavy orange giggle strip. On the Humour shelves, I will never know why or how, was Gertrude Stein, presumably because she wrote what looked like nonsense . . .
    Well, maybe she did, and often she did, though for reasons that made a lot of sense, but The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a delightful book, and a true groundbreaking moment in English literature – in the same way that Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) is groundbreaking.
    Woolf called her novel a biography, and Stein wrote somebody else's autobiography. Both women were collapsing the space between fact and fiction – Orlando used the real-life Vita Sackville-West as its heroine, and Stein used her lover, Alice B. Toklas.
    Sure, Defoe had called Robinson Crusoe an autobiography (Stein references that), and Charlotte Bronte had to call Jane Eyre a biography, because women were not supposed to go around making things up – especially stories where the morality is daring if not dodgy.

    But Woolf and Stein were radical to use real people in their fictions and to muddle their facts – Orlando , with its actual photos of Vita Sackville-West, and Alice Toklas, the supposed writer, who is Stein's lover but not the writer . . .
    For me, fascinated with identity, and how you define yourself, those books were crucial. Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open – the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants.
    The night I left home I felt that I had been tricked or trapped into going – and not even by Mrs Winterson, but by the dark narrative of our life together.
    Her fatalism was so powerful. She was her own black hole that pulled in all the light. She was made of dark matter and her force was invisible, unseen except in its effects.
    What would it have meant to be happy? What would it have meant if things had been bright, clear, good between us?
    It was never a question of biology or nature and nurture. I know now that we heal up through being loved, and through loving others. We don't heal by forming a secret society of one – by obsessing about the only other ‘one’ we might admit, and being doomed to disappointment. Mrs Winterson was her own secret society, and she longed for me to join her there. It was a compulsive doctrine, and I carried it forward in my own life for a long time. It is of course the basis of romantic love – you + me against the world. A world where there are only two of us. A world that doesn't really exist, except that we are in it. And when one of us fails the other . . .
    And one of us will always fail the other.
    When I walked away that night I was longing for love and loyalty. The wide yearning of my nature had to funnel through a narrow neck – it went into the idea of the ‘other’, the almost-twin, who would be so near to me but not me. A Plato-like split of a complete being. We would find each other one day – and then everything would be all right.
    I had to believe that – how else would I have coped? And yet I was heading for the dangerous losses that ‘all or nothing’ love demands.
    But – and this matters – you really don't have much choice when you are sixteen. You leave with your inheritance.
    But . . .
    There is always a wild card. And what I had were books. What I had, most of all, was the language that books allowed. A way to talk about complexity. A way to ’keep the heart awake to love and beauty (Coleridge).
    I walked around for most of the night the night that I left home. The night was in slow motion, and nights are so much slower than days. Time is not constant and one minute is not the same length as another.
    I was in a night that was lengthening into my life. I walked away and I was trying to walk away from the dark orbit of her depression. I was trying to walk out of the shadow she cast. I wasn't really going anywhere. I was going to be away, free, or so it seemed, but you always take it with you. It takes much longer to leave the