Tag Archives: Adoption

‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’ These are the words Jeanette Winterson’s adoptive mother said to her when she left home at the age of sixteen after falling in love with another woman.  Her memoirs mostly recount her childhood growing up in working-class Accrington living with her adoptive Pentecostal parents and her later search for her birth parents.  I used to think that no autobiography could be more bleak than Frank McCourt’s account of growing up in poverty in ‘Angela’s Ashes’ but Winterson’s description of her fearsome adoptive mother was particularly harrowing.  To say her childhood was appalling is probably an understatement and yet she poignantly reflects on love and life without succumbing to self-indulgence.  Her search for her birth mother is very moving and you will feel her frustration at the bureaucracy process coming off the page. Continue reading →