Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

"That’s a very good point. In Oranges are Not the Only Fruit her mother is a monster, and yet actually her mother had a really interesting life; she’d obviously been a very attractive young woman, she’d lived in France, she’d had a French boyfriend, she’d had different boyfriends. I mean, that was extraordinary. And then she found God. This is the novelised version of her life that she wrote when she was much younger. Then she wrote the real version as a normal memoir years later, and called it, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal ? That was absolutely the attitude that I was brought up with; the most important thing was not that you should be happy, it’s that you should fit in, and not bring about a scandal of any sort. I can remember when my eldest sister wanted to go on holiday with her boyfriend and I don’t think they were even having sex but my mother brought the priest to the house. The priest quoted St Paul about avoiding temptation to try to persuade my sister not to go on holiday with her boyfriend. When I had a child by artificial insemination my mother was devastated and literally said to me, ‘What will the neighbours say?’ And I said to her, ‘Funnily enough, when I decided I wanted to have a baby I never thought about the neighbours, that never came into my head.’ But after I did have the baby the neighbours thought it was very exciting, and one of them said if this had been available when she was younger, she would never have bothered getting married. The fact that Jeanette Winterson’s mother threw her out of the house because she was a lesbian, and said terrible things to her like, ‘I adopted the wrong baby, I adopted a bad baby’ – is just a really shockingly cruel way of behaving. But Jeanette Winterson overcame it. Maybe she got, from her mother, some of her strength. Her mother was clearly a very strong person, so she’s got this ambivalence about her. You’re right, I hadn’t thought about it, but in several of these memoirs a key thing in them is women’s relationship with their mothers. What makes their characters successful is successfully overcoming how their mothers want them to behave. But also they got something from their mothers. Certainly in the case of Viv, Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay, they all had very strong mothers. So you see the importance of having a strong mother, even if part of the strength they give you is that you have to fight them to escape them."

"Yes, I hesitated over this one, and I had to look it up to see if it was listed as a novel or a memoir because in my memory, it was a memoir. For anyone who hasn’t read it, Jeanette Winterson grew up in a very religious sect of Christianity. Famously, her mother says to her, ‘Why be happy when you could be normal?’—which is one of my favourite lines and is the title of her actual memoir, which followed after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Jeannette Winterson is the kind of writer who writes really direct to the page. What she’s doing looks really simple because it has that sense of immediacy, but it’s a highly technical skill. You feel her voice is absolutely unadulterated, coming straight at you; there’s not a single word out of place. Her family used to go to religious caravan festivals. The scene that remains in my mind is where they’re out in an enormous tent in some field. She’s having to continually abide by this sect, but she’s gay and can’t wait to get out. She is absolutely an alien in her own family, but she’s not relentlessly judging it. I think it’s one of the best semi-autobiographical novels you can get your hands on. It’s absolutely brilliant."