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Summary
Summary
Innovative in style, its humour by turns punchy and tender, Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession. It's a love story, too. Winterson's adaptation of the novel was an internationally acclaimed television drama awarded a BAFTA for best drama and an RTS award in the same year; the Prix Italia; FIPA D'Argent at Cannes for best script; The Golden Gate in San Francisco and an ACE Award at the Los Angeles television festival.
Author Notes
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959 and graduated from St. Catherine's College, Oxford.
Her book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, is a semi-autobiographical account of her life as a child preacher (she wrote and gave sermons by the time she was eight years old). The book was the winner of the Whitbread Prize for best first fiction and was made into an award-winning TV movie. The Passion won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize for best writer under thirty-five, and Sexing the Cherry won the American Academy of Arts and Letters' E. M. Forster Award.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Guardian Review
When Jeanette Winterson discussed Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit at the Guardian book club, we could not get away from the responses of one particular reader. The reaction of the novelist's adoptive mother, "Mrs Winterson", was still alive in her memory. "She was livid". In a pre-arranged conversation down the line from London to a public phone box in Accrington, Winterson had tried to explain "it's not about us in any real way". Her mother was not having any of it. "It's the first time I've had to order a book in a false name." Perhaps she would have come to accept the novel, but it would have taken more years than she had left. (Weirdly enough, Winterson told us, she actually died while watching the second episode of the television version.) In the book, the narrator's unnamed mother is never stumped for a response to the world's ungodly ways. So too in life, as she riposted to her daughter's new-found success as an author: "Jeanette, why be happy when you could be normal?" Winterson began the evening by stressing that the book was not an autobiography, but more than one reader worried that talking about it was painful. "Does it feel like being dragged back to somewhere?" "I don't mind talking about it. In fact," she added, "I don't mind anything any more." Anger was gone and she had reached a state of "complete Zen". "I used to doorstep journalists - I've given it all up." Another reader wondered whether the "process of writing Oranges " had had the purpose of "either making sense of a childhood or distancing and putting it behind her". "Was there some therapeutic function served by writing this as a first book?" Winterson acknowledged that there had been something "cathartic" in doing so, "but that wasn't the purpose". Any private intention was beside the point. As she rather coolly observed, "what has value to ourselves doesn't necessarily have value to others". Yet she did believe that "you write from a wound . . . There is a place in you that won't heal." She agreed that the story of her adoption crops up elsewhere in her fiction. It is reflected in the orphan subplots of Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook and returns, in starkly unmediated form, in her most recent novel, The Stone Gods . For one reader, the surprising thing was not that Winterson had used the story of her own upbringing, but that she had done so without hint of "bitterness or sorrow". She had expected the line that is the novel's title to be said by her protagonist in resentful rebellion against her mother. "In fact, you were kind enough to let her say it." There was some curiosity about this title, which Winterson herself cheerfully admitted to finding ridiculous. (When she told Pandora, the book's first publishers, what she intended to call it "they were very sorrowful"). She seemed amused and surprised to hear that Eng Lit students might have written essays on fruit symbolism in the novel (while conceding that its two mischievous epigraphs about oranges - a real quote from Mrs Beeton and a bogus one from Nell Gwynn - would probably have encouraged them). The title was inspired by Mrs Winterson, who was obsessed with oranges, because "she thought we were all going to die of scurvy". During the second world war, oranges were indeed distributed to civilians, to keep up their Vitamin C intake. Mrs Winterson's only peculiarity was to maintain the dietary preoccupation long after hostilities had ceased. And the tinned pineapple? In the novel it is collected by the narrator's mother for the town's "mission for coloured people". In reality, this delicacy had been hoarded when Winterson had announced that she was returning from Oxford with a friend whose parents came from St Lucia in the West Indies. What would she eat? Tinned pineapple was Mrs Winterson's bizarre answer, and for a couple of days this was a constituent of every dish that the exotic visitor was offered. What about the demons in the novel? The tormented protagonist is visited by an orange (of course) devil when locked in her room after her "unnatural" relationship with Melanie has been discovered. One reader was intrigued or perplexed by this hallucinatory episode. "Where did it originate?" If you are locked up without food for three days, you do have "some interesting brain reactions". Also her church was "big on demons", she recalled, entertaining us with anecdotes of Mrs Winterson's curious beliefs about devils and ectoplasm. But then was the idea of demonic intervention so odd? There seem to be plenty of devils living in us, Winterson observed. Strangely enough, she was concurring with an avowedly Christian blogger to the book club website who had enjoyed her novel but worried that many other readers complacently "demonised" religious enthusiasm. "It's outside Christianity that the demons are, the fiery demons of hate, terror and domination . . . Hell does exist". Novelists cannot control the lessons their readers will take. John Mullan is professor of English at University College London. Join him and Alasdair Gray to discuss Lanark at the Newsroom, 60 Farringdon Road, London EC1 on November 22. To reserve a ticket (pounds 8) call 020 7886 9281 or email book.club@guardian.co.uk To order a copy of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for pounds 7.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875 Caption: article-Bkclub10.1 [Jeanette Winterson] began the evening by stressing that the book was not an autobiography, but more than one reader worried that talking about it was painful. "Does it feel like being dragged back to somewhere?" "I don't mind talking about it. In fact," she added, "I don't mind anything any more." Anger was gone and she had reached a state of "complete Zen". "I used to doorstep journalists - I've given it all up." Another reader wondered whether the "process of writing Oranges " had had the purpose of "either making sense of a childhood or distancing and putting it behind her". "Was there some therapeutic function served by writing this as a first book?" Winterson acknowledged that there had been something "cathartic" in doing so, "but that wasn't the purpose". Any private intention was beside the point. As she rather coolly observed, "what has value to ourselves doesn't necessarily have value to others". - John Mullan.
Library Journal Review
Raised by an oppressively evangelical mother, Jeanette grows up a good little Christian soldier, even going so far as to stitch samplers whose apocalyptic themes terrify her classmates. As she dryly notes, without self-pity or smugness, ``This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake.'' Jeanette would have remained in the fold but for her unconventional desires; though she can reconcile her love of women with her love of God, the church cannot. It could have been a grim tale, but this first novelwinner of England's Whitbread Prizeis in fact a wry and tender telling of a young girl's triumphantly coming into her own. Highly recommended. Barbara Hoffert, ``Library Journal'' (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
Like most people I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle; it didn't mater what. She was in the white corner and that was that. She hung out the largest sheets on the windiest days. She wanted the Mormons to knock on the door. At election time in a Labour mill town she put a picture of the Conservative candidate in the window. She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Enemies were: The Devil (in his many forms) Next Door Sex (in its many forms) Slugs Friends were: God Our dog Auntie Madge The Novels of Charlotte Brontë Slug pellets and me, at first, I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World. She had a mysterious attitude towards the begetting of children; it wasn't that she couldn't do it, more that she didn't want to do it. She was very bitter about the Virgin Mary getting there first. So she did the next best thing and arranged for a foundling. That was me. I cannot recall a time when I did not know that I was special. We had no Wise Men because she didn't believe there were any wise men, but we had sheep. One of my earliest memories is me sitting on a sheep at Easter while she told me the story of the Sacrificial Lamb. We had it on Sundays with potato. Sunday was the Lord's day, the most vigorous days of the whole week; we had a radiogram at home with an imposing mahogany front and a fat Bakelite knob to twiddle for the stations. Usually we listened to the Light Programme, but on Sundays always the World Service, so that my mother could record the progress of our missionaries. Our Missionary map was very fine. On the front were all the countries and on the back a number chart that told you about Tribes and their Peculiarities. My favourite was Number 16, The Buzule of Carpathian. They believed that if a mouse found your hair clippings and built a nest with them you got a headache. If the nest was big enough, you might go mad. As far as I knew no missionary had yet visited them. My mother got up early on Sundays and allowed no one into the parlour until ten o'clock. It was her place of prayer and meditation. She always prayed standing up, because of her knees, just as Bonaparte always gave orders from his horse, because of his size. I do think that the relationship my mother enjoyed with God had a lot to do with positioning. She was Old Testament through and through. Not for her the meek and paschal Lamb, she was out there, up front with the prophets, and much given to sulking under trees when the appropriate destruction didn't materialise. Quite often it did, her will of the Lord's I can't say. She always prayed in exactly the same way. First of all she thanked God that she had lived to see another day, and then she thanked God for sparing the world another day. Then she spoke of her enemies, which was the nearest thing she had to a catechism. As soon as 'Vengeance is mine saith the Lord' boomed through the wall into the kitchen, I put the kettle on. The time it took to boil the water and brew the tea was just about the length of her final item, the sick list. She was very regular. I put the milk in, in she came, and taking a great gulp of tea said one of three things. 'The Lord is good' (steely-eyed into the back yard). 'What sort of tea is this?' (steely-eyed at me). 'Who was the oldest man in the Bible?' No. 3 of course, had a number of variations, but it was always a Bible quiz question. We had a lot of Bible quizzes at church and my mother liked me to win. If I knew the answer she asked me another, if I didn't she got cross, but luckily not for long, because we had to listen to the World Service. It was always the same; we sat down on either side of the radiogram, she with her tea, me with a pad and pencil; in front of us, the Missionary Map. The faraway voice in the middle of the set gave news of activities, converts and problems. At the end there was an appeal for YOUR PRAYERS. I had to write it all down so that my mother could deliver her church report that night. She was the Missionary Secretary. The Missionary Report was a great trial to me because our mid-day meal depended upon it. If it went well, no deaths and lots of converts, my mother cooked a joint. If the Godless had proved not only stubborn, but murderous, my mother spent the rest of the morning listening to the Jim Reeves Devotional Selection, and we had to have boiled eggs and toast soldiers. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it depressed him. He would have cooked it himself but for my mother's complete conviction that she was the only person in our house who would tell a saucepan from a piano. She was wrong, as far as we were concerned, but right as far as she was concerned, and really, that's what mattered. Somehow we got through those mornings, and in the afternoon she and I took the dog for a walk, while my father cleaned all the shoes. 'You can tell someone by their shoes.' My mother said. 'Look at Next Door.' 'Drink,' said my mother grimly as we stepped out past the house. 'That's why they buy everything from Maxi Ball's Catalogue Seconds. The Devil himself is a drunk' (sometimes my mother invented theology). Maxi Ball owned a warehouse, his clothes were cheap but they didn't last, and they smelt of industrial glue. The desperate, the careless, the poorest, vied with one another on a Saturday morning to pick up what they could, and haggle over the price. My mother would rather not eat than be seen at Maxi Ball's. She had filled me with a horror of the place. Since so many people we knew went there, it was hardly fair of her but she never was particularly fair; she loved and she hated, and she hated Maxi Ball. Once, in winter, she had been forced to go there to buy a corset and in the middle of communion, that very Sunday, a piece of whalebone slipped out and stabbed her right in the stomach. There was nothing she could do for an hour. When we got home she tore up the corset and used the whalebone as supports for our geraniums, except for one piece that she gave to me. I still have it, and whenever I'm tempted to cut corners I think about that whalebone and I know better. My mother and I walked on towards the hill that stood at the top of our street. We lived in a town stolen from the valleys, a huddled place full of chimneys and little shops and back-to-back houses with no gardens, The hills surrounded us, and out own swept out into the Pennines, broken now and again with a farm or a relic from the war. There used to be a lot of old tanks but the council took them away. The town was a fat blot and the streets spread back from it into the green, steadily upwards. Our house was almost at the top of a long, stretchy street. A flagged street with a cobbly road. When you climb to the top of the hill and look down you can see everything, just like Jesus on the pinnacle except it's not very tempting. Over to the right was the viaduct and behind the viaduct Ellison's tenement, where we had the fair once a year. I was allowed to go there on condition I brought back a tub of black peas for my mother. Black peas look like rabbit droppings and they come in a thin gravy made of stock and gypsy mush. They taste wonderful. The gypsies made a mess and stayed up all night and my mother called them fornicators but on the whole we got on very well. They turned a blind eye to toffee apples going missing, and sometimes, if it was quiet and you didn't have enough money, they still let you have a ride on the dodgems. We used to have fights round the caravans, the ones like me, from the street, against the posh ones from the Avenue. The posh ones went to Brownies and didn't stay for school dinners. Once, when I was collecting the black peas, about to go home, the old woman got hold of my hand. I thought she was going to bite me. She looked at my palm and laughed a bit. 'You'll never marry,' she said, 'not you, and you'll never be still.' She didn't take any money for the peas, and she told me to run home fast. I ran and ran, trying to understand what she meant. I hadn't thought about getting married anyway. There were two women I knew who didn't have any husbands at all; they were old though, as old as my mother. They ran the paper shop and sometimes, on a Wednesday, they gave me a banana bar with my comic. I liked them a lot, and talked about them a lot to my mother. One day they asked me if I'd like to go to the seaside with them. I ran home, gabbled it out, and was busy emptying my money box to buy a new spade, when my mother said firmly and forever, no. I couldn't understand why not, and she wouldn't explain. She didn't even let me go back to say I couldn't. Then she cancelled my comic and told me to collect it from another shop, further away. I was sorry about that. I never got a banana bar form Grimsby's. A couple of weeks later I heard her telling Mrs White about it. She said they dealt in unnatural passions. I thought she meant they put chemicals in their sweets. Excerpted from Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
