Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal? – packing for the journey

I’ve recently been reading Jeanette Winterson’s autobiography “Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal”- she was adopted into a very strange and unhappy family situation in Accrington in the 1960s. You’ll remember she wrote a famous screenplay/book about her childhood called ‘Oranges are not the Only Fruit’.

Summing up her childhood in the autobiography she says:

“There is a lot you can’t change when you are a kid. But you can pack for the journey…”

In her case ‘packing for the journey’ partly meant reading all the great literature she could at Accrington Library – and that way she knew there were many different endings to any story’s starting point…

It’s a rich and very open metaphor and leaves you completely free to choose what it is you might pack.

Is this the sort of thing us ‘ologists should be dealing in – metaphors of hope?

AND – Here’s the Amazon link to the Book

Derek Wilson

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