Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?: Chapter 9 Summary & Analysis

At the time she is kicked out of the house, Jeanette is steadily working her way through the English Literature in Prose A-Z section of the Accrington public library, but is making time for poetry as well. She takes inspiration from the poetry of Andrew Marvell, and decides that she will put “all she can” into finding “a room of her own” and participating in the world outside of Accrington. She feels companionship with the writers whose work she reads, realizing that “writers are often exiles, outsiders, runaways, and castaways.” She feels that the great writers are there in Accrington with her. She takes refuge in the work of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Charlotte Bronte, fascinated by stories about identity and how one defines oneself. She learns the value of “reading [her]self as a fiction as well as a fact” in order to keep the narrative of her life from running away with itself “toward an ending no one wants.”

Jeanette feels she has been “tricked or trapped” into leaving home by the “dark narrative” of her life with Mrs. Winterson. She wonders what it would have meant to be happy with her mother—what life could have been like if her mother had not wished for them to be in a world where there were only the two of them, and in which they could only ever fail the other. The only thing that keeps her going in the wake of having left home is the idea that one day she will find her mirror—her “almost-twin”—and find happiness. 

After days of sleeping in shelters and in public, Jeanette decides to live in her Mini Cooper. The car has been given to her by a boy from church whose parents believe he should learn how to drive, though he is terrified of it. Jeanette reads and eats in the front of the car and sleeps in the back, and drives the Mini around despite the fact that she does not have a license. She spends each Saturday with Janey and continues to work at the Accrington market.

Jeanette is on the letter “N” in her journey through literature, and is reading Nabokov’s Lolita. She is disgusted by it, and asks her two English teachers what they think of Nabokov. One teacher, a man, defends Nabokov. But when she asks the question of the head of English at her school, Mrs. Ratlow—a flamboyant and unpredictable teacher who is deeply devoted to literature—it leads to a conversation in which Jeanette confesses everything—the fact that she is living in her Mini and reading her way through English Literature A-Z. Mrs. Ratlow tells Jeanette she can stay at her house, gives her a key, and tells her that she must pay for her own food and maintain quiet after 10 p.m. Jeanette confesses that she has never had a key before. Mrs. Ratlow tells Jeanette that she must finish Lolita, but does not have to continue reading alphabetically.

After school Jeanette goes to the Accrington library, where she is helping the librarian to re-shelve some books. She notices a book by Gertrude Stein, and begins perusing it. The librarian asks Jeanette how her journey through English Literature in Prose A-Z is going, and Jeanette confesses that she is struggling with the letter “N.” The librarian suggests that Jeanette return to Lolita when she is older if she doesn’t like it now, and explains the ways in which one can derive comfort from the Dewey Decimal System—“trouble,” the librarian says, is often “just something that has been filed in the wrong place.”

Jeanette leaves the library with Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas—a book written by Stein about her female lover—and then drives her Mini Cooper over to Mrs. Ratlow’s house. She is grateful that Mrs. Ratlow is “giving [her] a chance,” though she has no idea whether anything she is doing is “the right thing to do.” That night, Jeanette reads The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Gertrude and Alice are taking a road trip through France, and Gertrude refuses to read maps or drive in reverse. Alice, frustrated, explains that the two of them are on the wrong road, and “Gertrude drives on. She says, ‘Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it.’”