PositiveThe New York Times Book ReviewReally, then, this is a kind of memoir-anthology: a composite Gornick. The effect of all the hopping between present and past is like that of a psychoanalytic monologue, a mind circling a central question: How did I come to be this way? Slowly, there emerges a self-portrait of the author, a proud woman who lives in a sparsely appointed apartment in Greenwich Village, who gets into arguments on the bus about loud cellphone conversations, who looks forward to joining the throng of people on the street during the long afternoon walk that is her break from writing. At a certain point it becomes clear that this populous book is about being alone. This is strangely devastating. Writing about aloneness is an interestingly difficult task, like writing about air or the color white. Gornick mostly knows better than to confront it head-on; instead, she lets it seep into her descriptions of other phenomena: the intensity of her reading and friendships, her sensitivity to company ... Her memoir gains its tension from the threat of impinging loneliness, its joy from the encounters she forges on her own, nameless, on the street.
Jeanette Winterson
PositiveThe Financial Times...she has undertaken an altogether more unconventional, ambitious project in Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, a memoir about how the stories we tell can bring us closer to the truth or help us hide from it. \'Part fact part fiction is what life is,\' Winterson writes. \'And it is always a cover story\' ... Winterson confronts her actions, personality quirks, even sexuality, with a kind of violence, as if forcing herself to be honest ... Living happily, Winterson realises, is about containing demons; one of the book’s finest passages deals with how Winterson (whose current partner is the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach) argued with her inner, suicidal self ... The urgency of Winterson’s language, often excessive and with a heavy reliance on ellipses, make the book read a little like a first draft. Yet, for all its eccentricities, the prose is often breathtaking: witty, biblical, chatty and vigorous all at once.
