Jeanette Winterson’s reading of her new book, Why be happy when you could be normal? at the Royal Exchange on Sunday 30th October was wonderful in the most real sense of the word. She read parts of her autobiography almost in a trance like, dancing way, as if the words had come back to her from some place far away, buried in her past.
More sprite- like than merely human, I found the expressiveness of her words transporting and rather faery-like as well as suddenly and most loomingly like a smack on the head. I cried at her loneliness, and laughed at her compassionate, witty tales of her adopted mother, whose maternal care left so much to be desired.
Reading can heal.
We do read to heal ourselves and others. No one knows this better than Jeanette Winterson and here in my favourite book we find her pools of words, her ‘word pools’ that raise the dead and let them talk to us and then to heal the listeners who dare to listen :
”They say the dead don’t talk. Silent as the grave they say. It’s not true.The dead are talking all the time. On this rock, when the wind is up, I can hear them.” ( The Passion)
Time is more illusory than we may dare to admit. Hearing the past through a very permeable present, allows us to co-exist with our experience, to reconcile that which we have done or thought with where we are now. And where are we now?
(Re) Orientation is the key!
Janet Lewison