The Shelf Help Sessions: 12 Reasons to Feel Better, Kings Place

An unusual literary event, this, and all the more intriguing for that. The Shelf Help Sessions: 12 Reasons to Feel Better will bring together renowned author Jeanette Winterson in conversation with Stephen Grosz, psychoanalyst and author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Examined Life, for a part literary discussion, part therapy session.

Both writers appear in Vintage Book’s Shelf Help list – twelve titles designed to prove ultimately life-affirming for the reader. Winterson, of course, blew the socks off the literary world with her 1985 debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – a roman à clef that drew heavily on her own miserable upbringing as an adopted child discovering her homosexuality in a strict, repressive Pentecostal family. But she has been disarmingly frank in admitting that the demons she thought she had faced in that novel came back to haunt her when a series of events triggered a breakdown and subsequent suicide attempt in 2008.

And so her latest book, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal, is a memoir that tackles all of this head on, without the ameliorating veil of fiction, in far more unflinching terms. Between examining her own experiences and state of mind, tracking down her birth mother and trying to reach a kind of reconciliation with her adoptive parents, the book is both frightening and moving, vulnerable yet fierce, sad and yet, with her wonderful knack for comic observation and anecdote, characteristically funny, and ultimately celebratory.

Grosz’s book distils twenty-five years of expertise directly from the analyst’s couch. With such experience of human psychology and behaviour behind him, he will surely understand exactly where Winterson is coming from. Contrary to what you might expect, there’s no chance of this being a dour, depressing evening. Expect knowledgeable insights, cathartic exploration and, yes, plenty of laughs and some uplifting conclusions to take away with you.

Ticket price: £9.50