“The Accrington public library had a copy of most things. It had a copy of Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas (1932)”. The phrase is  put at the beginning of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal’s 9^th chapter English Literature A-Z.

The reader has just understood books had and have an important role in Jeanette’s life. The choice to put  Gertrude Stein’s book at the start makes the reader understand reading The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas was fundamental. Gertrude Stein’s book is the autobiography of herself, indeed the title want to make readers believe the biography is objective. The book contains narrator’s unconscious and conscious thoughts. According to Jeanette Winterson people aren’t only a sequence of events, only some of them influenced and changed us, mainly events of emotional impact in our life, indeed they shaped our identity. In addition Jeanette said the consciousness of what happens make people be able to take in hands their life and to take its where they wanted.

The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas is not only Gertrude Stein’s biography, but it deals with her feelings, thoughts and personal experiences. She represents a Jeanette Winterson’s female gender example and as Jeanette wrote “for me, fascinated with identity, those books (Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas) were crucial”.