Jeanette winterson why be happy radio 4

I was unsure what the book was trying to be - to be brutally honest, if I wanted incisive views on the future of AI and how it will impact upon our lives in the future then I'd read a book written by an expert on it. Not bad by any means, but 12 Bytes missed the mark for this reader.

Thank you Netgalley and Grove Atlantic for the advance copy, which was provided in exchange for an honest review. Extremely poignant and thought provoking examination of the journey of humankind towards a world of AI and its further advancements. What do we believe we are in control of in the present world, how come we readily let our own lives be open to misuse by algorithms, how will we ever live in an equal world when the tech world is led by predominantly white males?

Essential reading, in my humble opinion. View 2 comments. Also, half the people in my house were Scottish that night, so I swear she was doing it to wind me up. What Winterson is asking is how did a concept imagined by women like Lovelace and Shelley end up being in the hands of men like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk?

Re-examining the history of AI from a feminist perspective brings to light the extraordinary work of women such as the codebreaking contemporaries of Turing at Bletchley Park, or Katherine Johnson who helped NASA put men not women into space. Winterson also takes us through the industrial revolution, when machines were supposed to make our lives easier but only made them busier and drove down wages, especially for women.

The parallels with the present day, where AI watches warehouse workers even as they take a toilet break, are striking. She calls for governments to start legislating Big Tech, particularly over taxes, but concedes none of them know how. Neural implants can connect us to the web, while nanobots clean up our bloodstreams. It is also released at a time when the future of AI, and humanity, could go in any direction.

Hopefully the people building these new brains will take a look at it, too. Nov 03, John Fetzer rated it it was amazing. These essays cover a wide variety of topics - the male dominated bastions of STEM and the mindsets that keep women out, the rise of AI and its effects on people and society, the rise of connectedness with its loss of privacy that is driven by the commercialism of Big Tech, robotics and misogyny.

All are intriguing takes and generally spot on. Most of what I knew about the author were the snippets of wisdom sent to me by my friend on subjects such as love and grief. Imagine my surprise to be greeted by essays focused on tech, AI, and sci fi!

There was a lot to engage with — I think this book is definitely worthy of a second or more read. She seriously considers these factors, but with the understanding that tech takeover is our future. The book itself is a lobby for the need for women and the humanities to be involved in the tech conversation. Winterson makes the compelling argument that, currently, tech is in the hands of mainly white men who have already screwed up the world repeatedly. If we want a benevolent future with something as powerful as AI, we need diverse creators involved and we need to allow artists, writers, and creatives involved.

Winterson crafts these essays carefully with a well-researched understanding of tech, history, and society. And, in the end, she relates all back to the reason I picked up the book in the first place: love. It was filled with such interesting ideas and connections of concepts - I just would have loved to have seen them in a more honed form. The book felt unpolished in the detail - with typos, inconsistencies in style, and things assertively stated that were not true - which undermined the clout of the arguments.

I also felt that the conversational narrative voice lacked clarity and made the logic of the essays harder to follow. I loved the idea of this book, but unfortunately not the execution. Overall this is an interesting and entertaining diversion, but it's a bit rambly and unfocussed. I'd have loved each of the essays to have a clearer point.

On the other hand, it feels as if the author is still working though and organising these thoughts for herself - which isn't necessarily a bad thing when the topics under examination are so current and still developing. It got me thinking and I enjoyed this book, although I think I would have enjoyed it more after a bit more editing. Intriguing ideas, full of male writers' quotes! Oct 17, Saoirse rated it it was ok. Amazing idea, poorly executed.

I am such a fan of Jeanette Winterson - particularly how she explores questions of gender, time, and the body through a postmodern lens in her fiction. So, when I discovered that she had written a nonfiction book on technology and AI - I jumped at the chance to read her book. What she gets right: The approach Winterson takes to questions of technology by drawing from a feminist perspective is exactly the kind of socio-critical analysis we need within the space today.

Her research is extensive but not quite thorough more on this in cons and her characteristic writing style is brilliant. What doesn't work at all: The research has significant gaps which prevents her feminist analysis from being truly intersectional. I would say she would benefit from reading on the history of race and technology, the decolonial perspectives on technological innovation as well as marxist analyses of the digital age to truly round out her perspectives. Secondly, her rhetoric is based entirely on structure and juxtaposing different historical stories to create contrast.

This approach works perfectly in fiction but in an essay format, I would expect this evidence to be sandwiched between original analyses and that simply did not happen. So the book feels like a well-curated book on the history of technology with little to know original insights.

Overall, I would say, if you enjoy Winterson's previous work for her writing style, her smooth sentences and her use of verbs, you can find good examples of that here. Love Jeanette Winterson. The Gap of Time Jeanette Winterson. Sexing the Cherry Jeanette Winterson.

The Passion Jeanette Winterson. The Powerbook Jeanette Winterson. Written on the Body Jeanette Winterson. Mark Haddon and others. The Stone Gods Jeanette Winterson. The Waves Virginia Woolf. Art Objects Jeanette Winterson. Penguin Pocket Hardbacks 15 Books. Vintage Blue 11 Books. Vintage Minis 43 Books. A Fairy Tale Revolution 4 Books. The best books to get you in the mood for Christmas.

Books to read for Halloween: from the slightly scary to full-on nightmarish. Jeanette Winterson on the books that changed her life. Where to start reading Jeanette Winterson's books. Books that shaped the s. Anita Rani talks to Monicah Kamandau from Kenya, Brianna Fruean from Samoa and Farhana Yamin, an expert in environmental law and giving a voice to vulnerable nations in international climate negotiations.

When you look back over your relationships do you see patterns? Today the story of a woman we are calling Katy who feels that her earliest experiences shaped what she looked for and needed from her partners. And Dani Larkin, a folk musician from the Armagh-Monaghan border joins Anita live in the studio, along with her banjo, to perform her new single — Bloodthirsty! I have been listening from states for a long while now I am going to really miss Jane as I already do miss Jenny I know I know she is gone yet just preparing myself!

Maybe they should rebrand as inclusivity hour. This podcast has made me feel so much more informed, particularly about topics that interest me and I care about!! I do wish, though, that the host would allow people to finish their thoughts rather than interrupting during interviews. Hannahderw , The Huds , Good Inside with Dr. Becky Kennedy. Wow in the World. Tinkercast Wondery.

The morning after with Kelly Stafford. Raising Good Humans. Dear Media, Aliza Pressman. Respectful Parenting: Janet Lansbury Unruffled. BBC Radio 4. Life Changing. Who can't relate to that feeling? After jumping many hoops throughout the inept and insensible bureaucracy that apparently rules the adoption system in the UK I suspect, the same is true in the US and other Western countries , she manages to find Ann, her birth mother, makes peace with her and her decision to give Jeannette away.

Of course, this being real life, there's not exactly a happy ending, not in the strict sense of the word anyway, so after her first meeting with Ann, she quickly comes to the realization that the instant connection she might had been anticipating does not come. Finally, I think that what saves Jeannette Winston is that she possesses both a very clever and inquisitive mind as well as an indomitable and defiant personality.

By the end of the book, she appears to have accomplish an exorcism of her own: what starts as a detailed and painful description of the horrible mother, ends with a sense of closure and forgiveness. She was a monster but she was my monster". We humans are full of contradictions, aren't we? Jeannette Winterson is the audiobook narrator of her memoir, I am for the most part, not a fan of authors narrating their own books and I do preferred that they leave this to the professionals, with that said, Winterson really did a wonderful job.

Perhaps because of the 1st person narrative and also because her writing style is so intense, I don't imagine anybody else being able to narrate this book as well as she did. This is an unforgettable and extraordinary memoir. View all 24 comments. May 26, Fionnuala added it Shelves: memoir-autobiography. There are authors who continually write and rewrite the same story, continually sand down the same hard facts, continually polish and repolish until they arrive at the final version which has the perfectly smooth shape of an egg, newly laid.

And at whatever angle you choose to view that egg, it remains perfect, impossible to add to or take away from. I'm thinking here of John McGahern in particular, who worked on the hard facts of a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood in many and var There are authors who continually write and rewrite the same story, continually sand down the same hard facts, continually polish and repolish until they arrive at the final version which has the perfectly smooth shape of an egg, newly laid.

I'm thinking here of John McGahern in particular, who worked on the hard facts of a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood in many and varied pieces of fiction until he produced his final novel, That They May Face The Rising Sun by which time he had worked through all his anger, all his loss, all his disappointment and could finally offer us, while still using many elements from his earlier works, a simple meditation on nature and the cycle of life and death.

I feel that Jeanette Winterson, who also experienced a lonely, repressed, religion dominated childhood, will someday arrive at a point where she will be able to offer us her own piece of perfection. This present book reads to me like a stage on the way towards that point, full of the promise of even better things to come. It is also a further exploration of some of the themes of her first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit , and is full of insights from her continually active writer's mind, insights on reading, on writing, on religion, on nature, on time, on life and on death.

McGahern and Winterson have many things in common but perhaps the most important thing they share is an early exposure to books, Winterson, in the public library in Accrington, McGahern by means of a kind neighbour's personal library, both reading their way steadfastly through the canon of English literature.

Both saved by books. She's a fighter and I salute her. View all 26 comments. Mar 10, Sophie Carlon rated it it was amazing Shelves: , 5-stars. Read this if you want your heart broken. Read this if you need it healed. There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling I might have expected the audacity of this book, but the humility startled me.

I expected the old trauma, but the fresh wounds caught me off guard. I was reminded of What to Look for in Winter: A Memoir in Blindness which I didn't think much of at all; the trauma memoir is not a genre I get along with. I love t There is still a popular fantasy, long since disproved by both psychoanalysis and science, and never believed by any poet or mystic, that it is possible to have a thought without a feeling I might have expected the audacity of this book, but the humility startled me.

I love the fictionalised version of Jeanette's growing up, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit so much; it's one of my favourite books, and here she shares that reading herself as fiction as well as fact was necessary and liberating.

I think it was necessary for me to enjoy the story, too. I felt for Jeanette here, and I appreciated her insights and on-point mini-polemics, especially into politics and northern working class life, but I definitely got more out of Oranges.

Lessing knew what she was talking about. I was also furious about the callous bureaucracy Jeanette faced when trying to find her birth mother. What the hell??!? The naked honesty with which she admits her struggles to love and be loved is so humbling, almost intimidating. The social worker, thankfully, knew exactly what to say, though nothing could ever be enough.

Most strangely I felt myself working towards some new spaces of creative self acceptance as I read. And most importantly, I was reminded to let myself feel, to love life and be open even when it hurts to be open. What else can I say? There are lots of quotables, particularly about books as homes and hearths , but this is my favourite.

I'm stashing it for later use, and I imagine I'll be pulling it out pretty regularly: When we are objective we are subjective too. When we are neutral we are involved. When we say 'I think' we don't leave our emotions outside the door. To tell someone not to be emotional is to tell them to be dead. View all 13 comments.

Oct 30, Diane Barnes rated it really liked it. In each case, the prose outweighed anything I might have felt about the story itself, because there is some indefinable quality there that defies description. In this, a memoir of her childhood as an adopted child of a Pentecostal woman who was mentally ill, and her search for her birth mother in middle age after she had become a celebrated author, the same thin I have read three of Winterson's books; The Gap of Time, a retelling of Shakespeare's Winters Tale, The Passion, and Christmas Stories.

In this, a memoir of her childhood as an adopted child of a Pentecostal woman who was mentally ill, and her search for her birth mother in middle age after she had become a celebrated author, the same thing applies.

She is brutally honest, even when describing her own mental breakdown and road to recovery, to become a person who felt worthy of love. In Jeanette's case, she claims that books saved her all her life, gave her someplace to go when she couldn't go home, and showed her another world. Books don't make a home - they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside.

There is warmth there too - a hearth. I sit down with a book and I am warm. I know that from the chilly nights on the doorstep". She also feels most at home and at peace in a bookshop or library.

So, although I was not adopted and always knew I was loved and had a happy childhood, I very much identified with both young Jeanette, who started in the A's of the library section "English Literature A - Z", and middle-aged Jeanette, who knew that books can be counted on when people can not.

I suspect a lot of GR readers feel the same. This is one of the better memoirs I've read in a while, and I still have a lot of Winterson's books to read yet, including her first novel, "Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit", which is a fictionalized version of her childhood. She's a remarkable author. I loved this a whole lot and cannot wait to read more of her books. Jeanette Winterson tells the story of relationship with her mothers; both her biological mother and her adopted mother. I listened to her tell this story on audiobook and I cannot recommend this highly enough.

Winterson infuses the story with her wry tone and wit and it was just a wonderful listening experience. The family she is adopted in are conservative to no end and especially her mother who she almost exclusively calls Mrs Winterson throughout the book is often horrible to her. This sense of reflection was what struck me the strongest about this book. While Jeanette Winterson does not have everything figured out by a long shot, she is eloquent and wise and often deeply funny and this made this memoir a joy to read.

You can find this review and other thoughts on books on my blog. View 2 comments. What a fierce child young Jeanette must have been. A small warrior, blazing with desire for life, battling the sheer bloody awfulness of her upbringing and the narrowness of her surroundings, protecting herself from further rejection by preventive strike. This brings startling, swirling effects when contrasted with the rhythms of the King James Bible or John Donne.

For the story that is skirted and prodded at here is the material of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit , published 26 years ago. She calls Oranges the cover version. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it. Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother, called Mrs Winterson throughout the book, was a fervent convert to the Elim Pentecostal Church who believed and declared that Satan had led her to the wrong crib, who read Jane Eyre to Jeanette, but changed the ending so that Jane married sanctimonious St John Rivers and went on missionary work with him, who burnt the books hidden under Jeanette's mattress because "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," who locked Jeanette out all night,who kept a revolver in the duster drawer, who believed Jeanette's sexuality was a demon to be exorcised.

The second half of the book IS raw. It is written in real time, as Jeanette Winterson rides out the storm of a complete breakdown, steadfastly waiting huddled below a wall outside her house in the country, looking at the view and waiting for the pain to pass.

A new relationship with the writer and psychologist Susie Orbach and the search for her birth mother drags her out of despair, but equally harrowing is the Kafkaesque tale of how bureaucracy throws stumbling blocks in the path of that search.

When she does find her birth mother, there is a strong sense of her having to re-calibrate her life to accommodate not only a mother but half siblings too. She ends "I have no idea what happens next. There are ripples of delightful humour among the bleak: The only time that Mrs Winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the Mormons were coming round. Then she waited in the lobby, and before they had dropped the knocker she had flung open the door waving her Bible and warning them of eternal damnation.

This was confusing for the Mormons because they thought they were in charge of eternal damnation. But Mrs Winterson was a better candidate for the job. The title, by the way, is the real question asked by Mrs Winterson when Jeanette walked out at the age of sixteen in order to be happy with her first girlfriend, Janey.

What mother does not want her child to be happy? View all 11 comments. Jan 21, Fiona rated it it was amazing Shelves: biography. JW was adopted by the Wintersons when she was six weeks old. Ahead of her lay a life of complexity, Pentecostal extremism, loneliness and abuse. He stood by while she was exorcised, possession by Satan being the only possible reason for her homosexuality. Half of the book is about her childhood and eventual arrival at Oxford University, achieved through her own hard graft and the support of one or two adults who recognised her abilities, the other half is about her adult search for her self and eventually for her birth parents.

In many ways, this book is a difficult read because it is so full of raw emotion. We may grow older but these selves are always with us. An easy 5 stars for me and recommended whether or not you have read her other work. I guarantee, however, that after reading this you will want to put that right.

View all 15 comments. Oct 17, JenniferD rated it really liked it Shelves: books , memoir , arc , owned. The impression this gives is not of sloppiness, but a desperate urgency to make the reader understand. This is certainly the most moving book of Winterson's I have ever read, and it also feels like the most turbulent and the least controlled.

In the end, the emotional force of the second Review by Zoe Williams, The Guardian - she says perfectly exactly how I felt about this memoir. In the end, the emotional force of the second half makes me suspect that the apparent artlessness of the first half is a ruse; that, in a Lilliputian fashion, what appears to be a straight narrative of her early life is actually tying the reader down with a thousand imperceptible guy ropes, so that when she unleashes a terrible sorrow, there is no escaping it and no looking away.

So anecdotes and jokes crop up in both books: the mother says the lesbian sweet-shop owners deal in "unnatural passions", and the young Jeanette thinks it means they put chemicals in their sweets; the gospel tent, the CB radio, all the memorable details of the first fictional outing come up again, but the point is not that this is repetitive.

Rather, that the documents are intended as companions, to lay this one over the last like tracing paper, so that even if the author poetically denies the possibility of an absolute truth, there emerges nevertheless the shape of the things that actually happened.

I had forgotten how upbeat Oranges was; it may have been peopled by eccentrics, with a heroine held in alienation by the aspic of impotent childhood, but there were upsides. She was not well loved. However, the story's leavened throughout by other observations. The geopolitics I sometimes found bold, and other times found too broad to be conclusive: "In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out. But then what happens to community — to society?

Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard.

And even with all this new, distressing detail, the story of her childhood ends well — it ends in escape. Then there's an odd page or two entitled "Intermission", which finishes: "The womb to tomb of an interesting life — but I can't write my own; never could. Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact … I am going to miss out 25 years … Maybe later …" And suddenly we are on to territory which is alarming, moving, at times genuinely terrifying; skip forward a quarter century, and Winterson has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner.

She finds her adoption papers in the effects of her dad, when he's moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. But often I could not talk. Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. The abandoned place. Other times, though, the scars of this first abandonment are given in the most unadorned, uncharacteristic prose, as though she's trying to gnaw her way through her own sophistication to get to the truth of it. In a way, the presence in the narrative of Susie Orbach, with whom Winterson started a relationship just before she started looking for her birth mother, acts as a reassurance to the reader as much as to the author, a fixed point to whom we can return, whose very inclusion means that, whatever happens, a fresh abandonment won't be the outcome.

Otherwise I genuinely think it would be unbearable. At one point I was crying so much I had tears in my ears. There is much here that's impressive, but what I find most unusual about it is the way it deepens one's sympathy, for everyone involved, so that the characters who are demons at the start — her adoptive mother but also, to a degree, her acquiescent adoptive father — emerge, by the end, as simply, catastrophically damaged.

In the process of uncovering that, she painstakingly unpicks the damage they wreaked on her. The peace she makes with her adoptive family is, in this sense, more important and evocative than the more complicated and double-edged peace that comes with tracking down her birth mother.

Mar 26, Chrissie rated it really liked it Shelves: religion , audible-uk , read , bio , england , relationships , lgtb , great-britain. It brings out in the open what had lain under the surface in the novel. I see Jeanette Winterson as being very strong, as having learned much from life. The troubles of her past have been worked through and resolved before the writing of this book.

She is a woman I admire. Listening to what life has taught her is not time wasted. An unhappy woman in an unhappy marriage. Jeanette does not bemoan what life has thrown at her. She is looking for neither sympathy nor pity. Her presentation is straightforward, not pushy. She has resolved her issues and speaks of what she has learned.

We can agree or discard her conclusions as we so wish. Wit and dry humor pepper the prose. There is strength, a punch, an optimism in her tone that I like. I like the prose very much. Jeanette had to read in secret. Learning first to read from the Bible, taught her, shaped her vocabulary and how to string together words. Life stamps us in unexpected ways. This book works well for those who are adopted, as well as for those who are not but want to get a glimpse into what being adopted might be like.

This book works equally well for the heterosexual and the homosexual. Emotional relationships concern all of us. Jeanette unabashedly speaks of her past. What she has lived through has not destroyed her; it has made her strong.

The author narrates the audiobook. She does it well. Her voice is strong and clear. Her personality and strength of character is mirrored in her tone of voice. Four stars for the audio narration. I want to read more by this author. She has a knack for words. She expresses her thoughts cogently. She is an intelligent woman.