‘The Story of My Life’: Winterson’s Adoption, Art and Autobiography

Abstract

It is impossible to know, perhaps even for Jeanette Winterson, whether the publication of her recent memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011), signifies a capitulation to, or a more positive embracing of, the public’s fascination with her personal life — a fascination that she has arguably almost as much encouraged as contested throughout her writing career. The complaint, expressed in several reviews of other female artists and writers (Winterson, 2002b; 2005b; c; 2006), justifiably holds that: a) within our patriarchal society, women are habitually seen to record experience, whereas men make art; b) even though art transforms personal experience, it often gets misconstrued as autobiography because of a mass fascination with the ‘real’ within contemporary culture; and c) women suffer more than men do from the cult of celebrity generated by the mass media, which commonly leads to a shift in attention from the work to the person. Actively resisting these circumstances, in her own work Winterson has always ambitiously attempted to combine fact and fiction, ‘experience and experiment’, ‘the observed and the imagined’ (2011: 3) — until Why Be Happy, that is.