Jeanette winterson’s memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is a postmodern novel and it is organised into 15 chapters, an intermission and a coda.The novel shows an important feature of postmodernism which is intertextuality. along the book, the writer uses many extracts from literature books of the past.

 In the novel, every title has a significant and deep meaning to the writer, who tells her story without following a chronological order but writing the events that characterized her life basing on the emotional impact. In the first chapter, “The Wrong Crib”, the world of J.Winterson’s adoptive mother is introduced to the readers. In chapter two, “My Advice to anybody is get Born”, the novelist suggests to be active people, and to take life into our hands, as she did when she was just a girl and she left home. Along the memoir, readers become aware of many different aspects of Jeanette’s life. For instance, in chapter six “Church” and seven “Accrington” themes such as religion and a narrow-minded vision of the world are developed. Chapter three  and chapter four are fundamental for a better understanding of the novel. In fact, the writer clearly tells her relationship with God, religion and Bible at home, since her mother was a pentecostal christian and had a very negative vision of religion and life in general. She obliged Jeanette not to read books except for the Bible, but of course the writer developed a life-long love for books, which she talks about in chapter nine and three.