Jeanette Winterson revisits her own life in this candid memoir, 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?'. She chronicles her evangelical upbringing by adoptive Pentecostal parents who destined her to be a missionary. Instead, Jeanette forges her own dissonant path, falling in love with a woman and igniting the wrath of her mother, who posed the eponymous question. This saga of self-discovery tracks Jeanette's plunge into madness and her courageous emergence, culminating in the quest for her birth mother. Throughout, the memoir celebrates the salvific power of literature, positioning fiction and poetry as life rafts amidst the tumult of searching for belonging, love, and identity. Jeanette's fierce pursuit of happiness paints a nuanced portrait of growing up queer in a repressive household and the inexorable pull of one's origins, merging humor and heartbreak in a testament to the reconstructive force of storytelling.