When Grandma died I found her. I didn't know she was dead. I just knew that she wasn't eating the jam and cream sandwiches.
This quote is a touching description of the experience of death from a child's perspective. Death is something we begin to understand as we get older and for the young Jeanette, it is not at first sight obvious that her Grandma has died. As she says 'I just knew that she wasn't eating the jam and cream sandwiches', showing us that when alive, this is something her Grandma did a lot. From this, we can deduce that her Grandma wasn't moving when she found her, which we know as a sign of death.
I needed lessons in love. I still do because nothing could be simpler, nothing could be harder, than love.
Love is a constant theme in Winterson's writings. The idea of being taught love and taught how to love is predominant in 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal', since Jeanette grows up feeling loved in a very strange way, maybe quite unloved, by her mother especially. As she has written in other fiction, love seems deceptively easy but also hard to get right: finding someone to love and someone who wants to love you in equal measure, and balancing the mix of emotions that come with being in love or out of love, is on the surface simple but in reality more complex.
My advice is this. When you are young and you read something that you very much dislike, put it aside and read it again three years later.
This nugget of advice comes from the librarian who appears in 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal'. It is advice that Jeanette takes on board but it is also advice that the reader can take on board. 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal' is a book about literature and the ways in which literature can help us to make sense of our lives and keep us on track even in the toughest moments. This comment is a suggestion to the reader of this book as much as any other that we change from year to year so our thoughts of a book when we are 15 will be different to our thoughts on the same book 5 or 10 years later, because we will have been shaped by new life experiences by that time.
Mrs Winterson was too big for her world, but she crouched gloomy and awkward under its low shelf, now and again exploding to her full three hundred feet, and towering over us.
Mrs Winterson is a character who first makes an appearance in 'Oranges are Not the Only Fruit'. She is domineering, a strict Protestant and quite literally larger-than-life itself. This image of Jeanette's adoptive mother displays her prowess and authority in the homestead by reference to the metaphorical size she could reach. It also reveals, via the verb 'exploding', that she was prone to angry outbursts.
