Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? - Jeanette Winterson

This meeting’s choices were all about autobiographies.

A tough-minded search for belonging, for love, identity, home, and a mother. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a memoir about a life's work to find happiness. It's a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in an north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the Universe as Cosmic Dustbin.

It is the story of how a painful past that Jeanette thought she'd written over and repainted rose to haunt her, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother.

Please remember to mark yourself as “Not Going” if you realise you can’t make it (or at the very least let me know a day ahead or a few hours before the event.)