Jeanette Winterson resources

For those of you interested in Winterson's life story, especially as she relates it in her 2011 autobiography, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, here are some things to check out.

You can read most of the first chapter of her memoir here. Here is a good review of the book/

Here you can watch her reading from Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? at the Sydney Writers's Festivval, 2012.

BBC1 filmed a marvelous documentary of Winterson and her life on the occasion of the autobiography's publication. Unfortunately, it has been wiped from the the internet and seems to be completely unavailable at the moment. However, here is this very good review of Jeanette Winterson – My Monster and Me which summarizes some of the key points of her memoir/life: her adoption and childhood in the English North (born in Manchester, raised in Accrington, Lancashire), her early life as a child Pentacostal preacher, her leaving home at 16 (not voluntarily) after her identification as a lesbian, her hard work at Accrington and Rossendale College which led to her acceptance at St Catherine's College, Oxford (while supporting herself with odd jobs and living out of her car).

I want to quote a few passages from the opening chapter of Winterson's memoir because I think they can be helpful for reading Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. In these passages Winterson is describing talking to her mother after the publication of Oranges, a novel that was an immediate success and written about widely, but a book her mother would only see as some kind of manifestation of evil:

I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t setting my story against hers. It was my survival from the very beginning.
...

It’s why I am a writer---I don’t say ‘decided’ to be, or ‘became’. It was not an act of will or even a conscious choice. To avoid the narrow mesh of Mrs Winterson’s story I had to be able to tell my own. Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story. I wrote my way out.
...

And I suppose that the saddest thing for me, thinking about the cover version that is Oranges, is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.

I am often asked, in a tick-box kind of way, what is ‘true’ and what is not ‘true’ in Oranges. Did I work in a funeral parlour? Did I drive an ice-cream van? Did we have a Gospel Tent? Did Mrs Winterson build her own CB radio? Did she really stun tomcats with a catapult?

I can’t answer these questions. I can say that there is a character in Oranges called Testifying Elsie who looks after the little Jeanette and acts as a soft wall against the hurt(ling) force of Mother.

I wrote her in because I couldn’t bear to leave her out. I wrote her in because I really wished it had been that way. When you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend.

There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that.
...

When we tell a story we exercise control, but in such a way as to leave a gap, an opening. It is a version, but never the final one. And perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else, and the story can continue, can be retold.

When we write we offer the silence as much as the story. Words are the part of silence that can be spoken.

Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent.

Do you remember the story of Philomel who is raped and then has her tongue ripped out by the rapist so that she can never tell?

I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced. All of us, when in deep trauma, find we hesitate, we stammer; there are long pauses in our speech. The thing is stuck. We get our language back through the language of others. We can turn to the poem. We can open the book. Somebody has been there for us and deep ­dived the words.
I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence. The one who breaks the silence is never forgiven. He or she has to learn to forgive him or herself.