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Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.
At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.
At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.
171 pages, Paperback
First published March 21, 1985
About the author
Jeanette Winterson
104 books7,123 followersNovelist Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester, England in 1959. She was adopted and brought up in Accrington, Lancashire, in the north of England. Her strict Pentecostal Evangelist upbringing provides the background to her acclaimed first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. She graduated from St Catherine's College, Oxford, and moved to London where she worked as an assistant editor at Pandora Press.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.
Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.
One of the most original voices in British fiction to emerge during the 1980s, Winterson was named as one of the 20 "Best of Young British Writers" in a promotion run jointly between the literary magazine Granta and the Book Marketing Council.
She adapted Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit for BBC television in 1990 and also wrote "Great Moments in Aviation," a television screenplay directed by Beeban Kidron for BBC2 in 1994. She is editor of a series of new editions of novels by Virginia Woolf published in the UK by Vintage. She is a regular contributor of reviews and articles to many newspapers and journals and has a regular column published in The Guardian. Her radio drama includes the play Text Message, broadcast by BBC Radio in November 2001.
Winterson lives in Gloucestershire and London. Her work is published in 28 countries.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 5,947 reviews
August 10, 2011
favorite excerpts:
"I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it."
"As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can you call home? Only the one who knows your name."
"I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it."
"As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can you call home? Only the one who knows your name."
December 25, 2023
‘To eat of the fruit means to leave the garden because the fruit speaks of other things, other longings.’
Jeanette Winterson writes prose that seeps into you the way warm sunshine does at the final edges of winter. She has a distinct voice with a confident cadence that can seamlessly sway between realism and the fantastical or fairy tale elements, harmonizing each aspect of her storytelling into a grand orchestral narrative that in each of her books pushes boundaries and doesn’t shy away from experimentation. What’s more is it always comes across as overtly cool and collected, like some celestial being wearing an edgy jacket with “punk as fuck” scrawled on the back. In Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Wintersons 1985 debut novel that reads like someone already deep into a celebrated writing career, this prose is put to the task of documenting a provincial pentocostal church community and Winterson’s depictions of evangelicalism is so deadpan and unironic at times it practically loops back into satire that the moments of direct criticism feel so nestled up in the narrative to make you understand how integral these dark moments are to the entirety of this lifestyle. Winterson’s use of diction and sharp imagery are as entertaining as they are direct, signifying how surreal the whole experience was to Winterson as she looks back on her own upbringing through the lens of fiction.
The thing is, much of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is autobiographical and there are very authentic and lived emotions pulsating through every page. Like Jeanette, the young narrator of the novel, Jeanette Winterson was adopted into an evangelical community and faced ostracism for being a lesbian. This book will ring true to anyone who spent their youth at Bible camps and growing up in a church community, which, as shown here, can be tight-knit communities that use religion to validate distrust of outsiders and dominate nearly every aspect of your social and emotional life. For those who are forced out it is like losing the earth underneath your feet, an aspect Winterson examines as a way that members are kept compliant and made to act against their own true selves.
‘History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play.’
The autobiographical inspirations acknowledged, this is not simply a memoir, and the act of fictionalizing her own experiences, as well as threading fairy tales throughout as abstract commentary on the socio-emotional underpinnings of the novel, is what gives it true power: a narrative constructed from history taps into meaning and purpose in a way a recounting of history cannot because ‘stories helped you to understand the world.’ This is something Jeanette comments on several times in the novel (the introspective segments blur Jeanette the narrator and Jeanette the author in a gleefully postmodern way):
To write a narrative is to fulfill the integrity of history. Fairy tales and Biblical stories, in this way, are given the same weight in Winterson novels as narratives that construct meaning. This becomes much more prominent in her following two novels, with both The Passion and Sexing the Cherry combining historical narrative with magical-realism to tell a new story from history that gives voice to the usually voiceless, and here Winterson recasts what is undoubtedly told in this particular church community as a wayward youth consumed by the Devil into a narrative that gives the supposed “sinner” the voice to show how they were wronged and abandoned. ‘We are all historians in our own way,’ Winterson writes, and she proudly affirms the powers of storytelling, both as a redemptive and retributive vessel. It is literary empowerment at its finest and teaches us ‘there is an order and a balance to be found in storytelling.’ As she writes in her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 'I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced...somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.' Winterson has been there and this book can likely be a life raft for those who need it.
‘If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.’
The novel is framed around Jeanette’s relationship with her mother and, because her mother figures herself an appendage of the Lord, the religious community she was brought up within. Adopted into the family ‘I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World’ she says from the start, quickly characterizing her mother as someone who considered herself always right and any dissent to be ‘not holy’ as she frequently says. The mother is fully devoted to the church and her only interests are in expanding her devotion, which over time includes working in a religious MLM and reading books on missionary work that are revealed to be increasingly racist propaganda. It is a rigid childhood, one of prayer and routine where Jeantte’s only acquaintances are members of the church, most notably the aging Elsie who was once a young prodigy of the church and has taken a special interest in her upbringing.
‘Eventually, I thought, I’ll fall in love like everybody else. Then some years later, quite by mistake, I did.’
Jeanette is always engaged in passing out bible tracts (you ever get one as a server that looks like a $20 bill and it says something like 'you'd be rich with Jesus' with a church address and you realize they did not tip you...fun stuff) finding new converts. Jeanette converts a young girl she meets and their private bible study sessions blossom into something more. The shame and confusion felt by knowing this is something you want and something that feels right but having been brought up to deny it and demonize it is a really uncomfortable maelstrom of emotions to be in. It can often turn into self-hatred or denial, and as much as one is their own worst critic, one can be their own worst judge, jury and jailer. ‘It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them,’ she comments, and all the internal struggle of denying oneself who you are and being told you are a sinner for simply being yourself is a hellish place to be in between the major events such as Jeanette being caught and facing the public exorcism from the Pastor.
Winterson uses the condemnation of her being a lesbian to look at how aversion to LGBTQ+ folks is often an aspect of patriarchy enforced by misogyny to separate anyone who is not white, heteronormative male. ‘The real problem, it seemed,’ Jeanette observes during her second round of punishment for being found out with another woman, ‘was going against the teachings of St. Paul, and allowing women power in the church.’ While initially it was assumed her ‘going astray’ came from outside influences such as public school (a ‘breeding ground’ for sin, her mother claims), the church elders get right into it and announce that women being allowed to preach opens up a weakness for the Devil to exploit. Jeanette understands then that the church powers exist to ensure ‘the message belonged to the men.’ Reading this novel written in 1985 England still resonates in 2022 America where this same anti-LGBT rhetroic is increasingly used as fundraising grifting for politicians. What Jeanette finds confusing, however, is the insistence that her ‘unnatural passions’ are ‘aping men.’ To sleep with a woman, it is implied, is only something a man can do.
‘There are women in the world. There are men in the world. And there are beasts. What do you do if you marry a beast?’
Much of this is tied into the ways Winterson examines how girls are socialized into submission, doubling down on the repressive nature of the church community for those who are women. ‘I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet,’ is an early lesson she learns from a lecherous shopkeeper who gives her candies, ‘and here were sweets to prove it.’ It’s a sort of purity culture that is certainly present in many evangelical communities that often teaches girls they should be compliant and submit to men. When Jeanette complains her uncle hurts her by rubbing his beard stubble on her face, she is told that he didn’t hurt her, but that it was ‘just a bit of love.’ She demonstrates the early childhood lessons that a man can harm her and still call it love, all aimed at keeping women subservient in a patriarchal culture. Melanie, Jeanette’s first lover, is thought to be recovered from her sins when she marries a man and devotes her life to having children, to which Jeanette observes she appears docile and ‘serene to the point of being bovine’ with all the spark that drew her to Melanie now snuffed out. Winteron also examines the double standards in judgment on gender biases. She juxtaposes Jeanette’s harmless love with consenting a peer, for which only she suffers consequences that upend her life, to the sexual transgressions and embezzelment of the pastor in the MLM, which harms many people and causes financial strains for the community. While Jeanette faces public humiliation and punishment, this man has people rally to cover his debts and even provide him a paid vacation. The double standard is readily apparent.
‘I peeled it to comfort myself, and seeing me a little calmer, everyone glanced at one another and went away.’
Somehow I’ve gotten this far in thinking about the novel without addressing oranges, which make for a multifaceted metaphor throughout the book. The mother only gives Jeanette oranges to eat, and the gift of an orange is often in place of emotional support, a treat meant to pacify but not heal. Late in the novel when she stands accused by her mother and her pastor, she offers them an orange, much to their confusion. It is a brief but brilliant moment where she puts their own symbol back in their face to express the inadequacy of their support.Late in the novel the mother eventually decides that ‘oranges are not the only fruit’ when it is advantageous to her missionary aims, which reads as ironic when her refusal to understand that heterosexuality is not the only path chased away the member of her flock most dear to her.
‘It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.’
The orange also appears as a demon Jeanette see’s during times of emotional stress, a demon that asserts demons are not bad, just a change in their life and tells her she can keep her demons and live a difficult life—but one that may be worth the difficulty—while reminding her that her sexuality is normal and being ‘different’ doesn't mean being bad. ‘Everyone has a demon,’ they tell her, ‘but not everyone knows how to make use of it.’ That it is a demo who pushes for self-acceptance and finding autonomy in her life is amusingly scandalous, as it is something conjured from the evangelical teachings yet also in opposition to them. The demon will travel everywhere with her, a reminder that the past follows us no matter what, but that we can survive it because ‘it was not judgment day but another morning.’
What truly brings this book together are the interspersed fairy tales that season the novel and serve as commentary on the story while being fully immersive experiences on their own. The final tale of Winnet, intertwined with the story of Sir Percival, creates a way to grasp Jeanette’s predicament that opens up such an emotional resonance that feels like an earthquake rather than the tremor of discomfort in the aspects of realism. Winnet’s tale briefly retells the novel through fantastical metaphor and leaves us with the feeling of dread with the wizard’s string tied around her that explains the Jeanette’s feeling of being unable to fully escape her mother’s control. If anything, this book is a testament to storytelling on multiple levels.
‘She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.’
Reading Winterson, I feel understood. I’ve had this with other authors but Winterson reaches into my being and polishes elements I didn’t think anyone else could know about. Which is part of the reason we all read, right? To discover we are not alone, that someone empathizes, that someone can put into words things you feel but thought otherwise ineffable. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a book that I could see having a huge impact on those who escaped similar situations, or could find themselves in this novel as a compass for where to go next. This book is actually quite funny and warm, despite the difficult topics, and it will pluck every emotional string you have in ways that will surprise you. Most importantly, this book gives hope. A harrowing debut that reads like a seasoned veteran of letters, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a must-read.
5/5
‘I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.’
Jeanette Winterson writes prose that seeps into you the way warm sunshine does at the final edges of winter. She has a distinct voice with a confident cadence that can seamlessly sway between realism and the fantastical or fairy tale elements, harmonizing each aspect of her storytelling into a grand orchestral narrative that in each of her books pushes boundaries and doesn’t shy away from experimentation. What’s more is it always comes across as overtly cool and collected, like some celestial being wearing an edgy jacket with “punk as fuck” scrawled on the back. In Oranges are Not the Only Fruit, Wintersons 1985 debut novel that reads like someone already deep into a celebrated writing career, this prose is put to the task of documenting a provincial pentocostal church community and Winterson’s depictions of evangelicalism is so deadpan and unironic at times it practically loops back into satire that the moments of direct criticism feel so nestled up in the narrative to make you understand how integral these dark moments are to the entirety of this lifestyle. Winterson’s use of diction and sharp imagery are as entertaining as they are direct, signifying how surreal the whole experience was to Winterson as she looks back on her own upbringing through the lens of fiction.
The thing is, much of Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is autobiographical and there are very authentic and lived emotions pulsating through every page. Like Jeanette, the young narrator of the novel, Jeanette Winterson was adopted into an evangelical community and faced ostracism for being a lesbian. This book will ring true to anyone who spent their youth at Bible camps and growing up in a church community, which, as shown here, can be tight-knit communities that use religion to validate distrust of outsiders and dominate nearly every aspect of your social and emotional life. For those who are forced out it is like losing the earth underneath your feet, an aspect Winterson examines as a way that members are kept compliant and made to act against their own true selves.
‘History should be a hammock for swinging and a game for playing, the way cats play.’
The autobiographical inspirations acknowledged, this is not simply a memoir, and the act of fictionalizing her own experiences, as well as threading fairy tales throughout as abstract commentary on the socio-emotional underpinnings of the novel, is what gives it true power: a narrative constructed from history taps into meaning and purpose in a way a recounting of history cannot because ‘stories helped you to understand the world.’ This is something Jeanette comments on several times in the novel (the introspective segments blur Jeanette the narrator and Jeanette the author in a gleefully postmodern way):
‘[T]hat is the way with stories; we make them what we will. It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time…Very often history is a means of denying the past. Denying the past is to refuse to recognize its integrity.’
To write a narrative is to fulfill the integrity of history. Fairy tales and Biblical stories, in this way, are given the same weight in Winterson novels as narratives that construct meaning. This becomes much more prominent in her following two novels, with both The Passion and Sexing the Cherry combining historical narrative with magical-realism to tell a new story from history that gives voice to the usually voiceless, and here Winterson recasts what is undoubtedly told in this particular church community as a wayward youth consumed by the Devil into a narrative that gives the supposed “sinner” the voice to show how they were wronged and abandoned. ‘We are all historians in our own way,’ Winterson writes, and she proudly affirms the powers of storytelling, both as a redemptive and retributive vessel. It is literary empowerment at its finest and teaches us ‘there is an order and a balance to be found in storytelling.’ As she writes in her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, 'I believe in fiction and the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues. We are not silenced...somebody has been there for us and deep-dived the words.' Winterson has been there and this book can likely be a life raft for those who need it.
‘If there’s such a thing as spiritual adultery, my mother was a whore.’
The novel is framed around Jeanette’s relationship with her mother and, because her mother figures herself an appendage of the Lord, the religious community she was brought up within. Adopted into the family ‘I had been brought in to join her in a tag match against the Rest of the World’ she says from the start, quickly characterizing her mother as someone who considered herself always right and any dissent to be ‘not holy’ as she frequently says. The mother is fully devoted to the church and her only interests are in expanding her devotion, which over time includes working in a religious MLM and reading books on missionary work that are revealed to be increasingly racist propaganda. It is a rigid childhood, one of prayer and routine where Jeantte’s only acquaintances are members of the church, most notably the aging Elsie who was once a young prodigy of the church and has taken a special interest in her upbringing.
‘Eventually, I thought, I’ll fall in love like everybody else. Then some years later, quite by mistake, I did.’
Jeanette is always engaged in passing out bible tracts (you ever get one as a server that looks like a $20 bill and it says something like 'you'd be rich with Jesus' with a church address and you realize they did not tip you...fun stuff) finding new converts. Jeanette converts a young girl she meets and their private bible study sessions blossom into something more. The shame and confusion felt by knowing this is something you want and something that feels right but having been brought up to deny it and demonize it is a really uncomfortable maelstrom of emotions to be in. It can often turn into self-hatred or denial, and as much as one is their own worst critic, one can be their own worst judge, jury and jailer. ‘It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them,’ she comments, and all the internal struggle of denying oneself who you are and being told you are a sinner for simply being yourself is a hellish place to be in between the major events such as Jeanette being caught and facing the public exorcism from the Pastor.
Winterson uses the condemnation of her being a lesbian to look at how aversion to LGBTQ+ folks is often an aspect of patriarchy enforced by misogyny to separate anyone who is not white, heteronormative male. ‘The real problem, it seemed,’ Jeanette observes during her second round of punishment for being found out with another woman, ‘was going against the teachings of St. Paul, and allowing women power in the church.’ While initially it was assumed her ‘going astray’ came from outside influences such as public school (a ‘breeding ground’ for sin, her mother claims), the church elders get right into it and announce that women being allowed to preach opens up a weakness for the Devil to exploit. Jeanette understands then that the church powers exist to ensure ‘the message belonged to the men.’ Reading this novel written in 1985 England still resonates in 2022 America where this same anti-LGBT rhetroic is increasingly used as fundraising grifting for politicians. What Jeanette finds confusing, however, is the insistence that her ‘unnatural passions’ are ‘aping men.’ To sleep with a woman, it is implied, is only something a man can do.
‘There are women in the world. There are men in the world. And there are beasts. What do you do if you marry a beast?’
Much of this is tied into the ways Winterson examines how girls are socialized into submission, doubling down on the repressive nature of the church community for those who are women. ‘I was a little girl, ergo, I was sweet,’ is an early lesson she learns from a lecherous shopkeeper who gives her candies, ‘and here were sweets to prove it.’ It’s a sort of purity culture that is certainly present in many evangelical communities that often teaches girls they should be compliant and submit to men. When Jeanette complains her uncle hurts her by rubbing his beard stubble on her face, she is told that he didn’t hurt her, but that it was ‘just a bit of love.’ She demonstrates the early childhood lessons that a man can harm her and still call it love, all aimed at keeping women subservient in a patriarchal culture. Melanie, Jeanette’s first lover, is thought to be recovered from her sins when she marries a man and devotes her life to having children, to which Jeanette observes she appears docile and ‘serene to the point of being bovine’ with all the spark that drew her to Melanie now snuffed out. Winteron also examines the double standards in judgment on gender biases. She juxtaposes Jeanette’s harmless love with consenting a peer, for which only she suffers consequences that upend her life, to the sexual transgressions and embezzelment of the pastor in the MLM, which harms many people and causes financial strains for the community. While Jeanette faces public humiliation and punishment, this man has people rally to cover his debts and even provide him a paid vacation. The double standard is readily apparent.
‘I peeled it to comfort myself, and seeing me a little calmer, everyone glanced at one another and went away.’
Somehow I’ve gotten this far in thinking about the novel without addressing oranges, which make for a multifaceted metaphor throughout the book. The mother only gives Jeanette oranges to eat, and the gift of an orange is often in place of emotional support, a treat meant to pacify but not heal. Late in the novel when she stands accused by her mother and her pastor, she offers them an orange, much to their confusion. It is a brief but brilliant moment where she puts their own symbol back in their face to express the inadequacy of their support.Late in the novel the mother eventually decides that ‘oranges are not the only fruit’ when it is advantageous to her missionary aims, which reads as ironic when her refusal to understand that heterosexuality is not the only path chased away the member of her flock most dear to her.
‘It is not the one thing nor the other that leads to madness, but the space in between them.’
The orange also appears as a demon Jeanette see’s during times of emotional stress, a demon that asserts demons are not bad, just a change in their life and tells her she can keep her demons and live a difficult life—but one that may be worth the difficulty—while reminding her that her sexuality is normal and being ‘different’ doesn't mean being bad. ‘Everyone has a demon,’ they tell her, ‘but not everyone knows how to make use of it.’ That it is a demo who pushes for self-acceptance and finding autonomy in her life is amusingly scandalous, as it is something conjured from the evangelical teachings yet also in opposition to them. The demon will travel everywhere with her, a reminder that the past follows us no matter what, but that we can survive it because ‘it was not judgment day but another morning.’
What truly brings this book together are the interspersed fairy tales that season the novel and serve as commentary on the story while being fully immersive experiences on their own. The final tale of Winnet, intertwined with the story of Sir Percival, creates a way to grasp Jeanette’s predicament that opens up such an emotional resonance that feels like an earthquake rather than the tremor of discomfort in the aspects of realism. Winnet’s tale briefly retells the novel through fantastical metaphor and leaves us with the feeling of dread with the wizard’s string tied around her that explains the Jeanette’s feeling of being unable to fully escape her mother’s control. If anything, this book is a testament to storytelling on multiple levels.
‘She must find a boat and sail in it. No guarantee of shore. Only a conviction that what she wanted could exist, if she dared to find it.’
Reading Winterson, I feel understood. I’ve had this with other authors but Winterson reaches into my being and polishes elements I didn’t think anyone else could know about. Which is part of the reason we all read, right? To discover we are not alone, that someone empathizes, that someone can put into words things you feel but thought otherwise ineffable. Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a book that I could see having a huge impact on those who escaped similar situations, or could find themselves in this novel as a compass for where to go next. This book is actually quite funny and warm, despite the difficult topics, and it will pluck every emotional string you have in ways that will surprise you. Most importantly, this book gives hope. A harrowing debut that reads like a seasoned veteran of letters, Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a must-read.
5/5
‘I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.’
July 18, 2022
I’m enamored with Jeanette Winterson’s writing and creative mind. I picked her up on a whim a few years ago without knowing much about her. Mainly she just happened to have written a book of Christmas stories and I must have had the Christmas spirit that year. After that I went on to read three of her novels and then began a quest to obtain all of her books – even the lesser known pieces. Fortunately, I’m taking my sweet time so I don’t run out of them too quickly. This, her first book, happened to be downloaded to my kindle when I needed to grab something quickly. It’s marketed as a work of fiction, but it’s my understanding that it is in fact semi-autobiographical. It is most certainly a sign of the tremendous writing to come. Written from the point of view of a young girl growing up in an evangelical family, Jeanette was set on course by her mother to become a church missionary. There’s a lot more humor here than I expected to find!
“I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught.”
I think it’s her fortitude, wit and creativity that allowed her to get through these difficult years when different ideas regarding religion, sexuality and social constructs were not at all accepted. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are stories that Jeanette has written. I see them as a coping mechanism and a precursor to what will later become her career in storytelling. I could best describe these as fantasies or fairytales perhaps. I have to admit that I ended up skimming through these as they ended up making the meat of the story feel too disjointed for my taste. I understand what she was doing there, but it didn’t quite suit me. Still, I could empathize with her taking solace in books and writing when she needed to escape the real world.
“In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”
As she matures and finds her first love, her mother and the church will have nothing to do with her “unnatural passions.” She begins to question her love for a church that refuses to accept her for who she is. Yet, she can’t reconcile her love for God with the attitude of her fellow worshippers. It’s all a bit confusing for a young person, and this part comes across so palpably in her writing. I could really feel her faith being tested. I think this is where Jeanette Winterson really shines in this piece.
“I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.”
So how do I rate a book that, against my better nature, I skimmed at points? Well, the thing is, despite the fact it’s not as good as what is later to come from this brilliant author, the framework has been established and I already know what lies ahead, in a sense. So I can’t help but admire it for its feeling of innocence. I can empathize with her confusion and disappointment in this corner of the world that was her life at the time. And in the end, I’m always amazed by her understanding of love in all of its varied facets. I’m going with 3 stars – it was good, but did I really like it? No, not as much as her others!
“I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names.”
“I didn’t know quite what fornicating was, but I had read about it in Deuteronomy, and I knew it was a sin. But why was it so noisy? Most sins you did quietly so as not to get caught.”
I think it’s her fortitude, wit and creativity that allowed her to get through these difficult years when different ideas regarding religion, sexuality and social constructs were not at all accepted. Sprinkled throughout the narrative are stories that Jeanette has written. I see them as a coping mechanism and a precursor to what will later become her career in storytelling. I could best describe these as fantasies or fairytales perhaps. I have to admit that I ended up skimming through these as they ended up making the meat of the story feel too disjointed for my taste. I understand what she was doing there, but it didn’t quite suit me. Still, I could empathize with her taking solace in books and writing when she needed to escape the real world.
“In the library I felt better, words you could trust and look at till you understood them, they couldn’t change half way through a sentence like people, so it was easier to spot a lie.”
As she matures and finds her first love, her mother and the church will have nothing to do with her “unnatural passions.” She begins to question her love for a church that refuses to accept her for who she is. Yet, she can’t reconcile her love for God with the attitude of her fellow worshippers. It’s all a bit confusing for a young person, and this part comes across so palpably in her writing. I could really feel her faith being tested. I think this is where Jeanette Winterson really shines in this piece.
“I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it.”
So how do I rate a book that, against my better nature, I skimmed at points? Well, the thing is, despite the fact it’s not as good as what is later to come from this brilliant author, the framework has been established and I already know what lies ahead, in a sense. So I can’t help but admire it for its feeling of innocence. I can empathize with her confusion and disappointment in this corner of the world that was her life at the time. And in the end, I’m always amazed by her understanding of love in all of its varied facets. I’m going with 3 stars – it was good, but did I really like it? No, not as much as her others!
“I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other’s names.”
April 10, 2019
I seriously had no idea that this year I would read 2 lesbian books (& 4 gay ones!: “The Line of Beauty,” “The Mad Man,” On the Road,” &, of course, let us never forget “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”). It's an obscure genre, if you ask me. “Tipping the Velvet” was disappointingly bland, although racy in parts and historically accurate, but it still felt a tad conventional. This, Winterson’s first uber-acclaimed novella, is philosophical and entertaining and funny, part autobiography and part soaring flight of fancy. It's an unpredictable telling of that age-old story of the eversad girl-meets-girl dilemma. As an outsider in her rather comically tightly-knit religious community, Jeanette interweaves fable-like metaphors to better understand her mother’s absolute rejection of her sexual orientation. But instead of deserting God, it's both interesting & empowering to see how she manages to strengthen her personal relationship with him.
July 15, 2016
I found this book completely baffling from beginning to end. I couldn't tell if it was because I wasn't raised religious, I wasn't raised in England, or because I wasn't raised by lunatics. I felt that something had been utterly lost in translation.
Sometimes I got the impression that the author had been issued a challenge to write sentences that no one in human history had ever written before. I started keeping a notebook of the strangest sentences. A few gems: "Our crocodile weaved in and out, ruining new shoes with sand and sawdust, sweating and sticking to each other." "I'll give you a cocktail stick only don't tell anyone what I use it for." "If she had taught me to read like other children had been taught to read, I wouldn't have these obessions. I'd be happy with a pet rabbit and the odd stick insect." "It were at Bingo 'ousie 'ousie three times." And my personal favorite: "It runs right the way through life, though it starts with hyacinth growing, passes through milk monitor, and finishes somewhere at half-blue."
There are themes here: Hating poor people, gay people, and non-believers. But all these subjects are only skirted around. There are huge sections of fairy stories that were supposed to be parables about the protagonist's life, only I didn't care enough to try to decipher them.
In short, I didn't get it, and I didn't care enough to read the whole damn thing over so I COULD get it.
Sometimes I got the impression that the author had been issued a challenge to write sentences that no one in human history had ever written before. I started keeping a notebook of the strangest sentences. A few gems: "Our crocodile weaved in and out, ruining new shoes with sand and sawdust, sweating and sticking to each other." "I'll give you a cocktail stick only don't tell anyone what I use it for." "If she had taught me to read like other children had been taught to read, I wouldn't have these obessions. I'd be happy with a pet rabbit and the odd stick insect." "It were at Bingo 'ousie 'ousie three times." And my personal favorite: "It runs right the way through life, though it starts with hyacinth growing, passes through milk monitor, and finishes somewhere at half-blue."
There are themes here: Hating poor people, gay people, and non-believers. But all these subjects are only skirted around. There are huge sections of fairy stories that were supposed to be parables about the protagonist's life, only I didn't care enough to try to decipher them.
In short, I didn't get it, and I didn't care enough to read the whole damn thing over so I COULD get it.
March 6, 2017
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a compelling novel about a young woman dealing with the pressures of conformity in a world that demands she be something she is not.
Jeanette is gay. The world she has known, the world of the church, shuns such behaviour. She was raised to be a missionary by her extremely controlling and zealous mother. Her path was laid out before her. And Jeanette was relatively obedient to begin with. She was ready to accept this life of servitude to God. She didn’t know any different; it’s the only path she believed was open to her. She didn’t look outside it. But life isn’t as simple as that. One day she meets someone who alteres everything. She falls in love. She sees an alternative, and she runs away.
So this is a story about new beginnings; this is a story that shows us that we can break through the bonds of expectancy and be whomever it is we wish to be. We don’t have to sit back and choke on the moral expectancies and norms of a society that controls our faculties. No. We can follow our hearts, and we can do what we know is right. This becomes a tale of self-realisation, one that’s structure reflects the narrative progress of the Bible. It begins with Genesis and Winterson chooses to end it with Ruth, the story that recognises female achievement and is read by modern critics as a celebration of lesbianism.
Jeanette tries to find her own way in life through sexual experimentation and religious rebellion. And by the end, the full autobiographical impact of this is revealed:
“Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”
This was certainly a daring first novel, though, that being said, I’ve never really had any inclination to read anything else by this author. (I read this back in 2015.) I did enjoy this, and it is a very good tale, but much of the merit is on the surface level of the writing. It’s very straight forward and clean-cut. I would have liked to see a little bit more depth in the language, and a few less puns on the title. Sometimes we don’t need to explicitly say something for the narrative to carry the meaning.
Overall, it's a quirky little book, full of passion and self-revelation. But, for me, it was missing something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps the book needed more time to grow and develop, perhaps the story needed to be carried a little further. It’s unusual for a first book, most authors, if they attempted something like this, it would be after they’d already released a few novels and were relatively established. But, again, that doesn’t mean we should always follow the rules. I was certain on giving this four stars before I started writing but, by the time I came to the end of this review, it’s ended up as a three.
Jeanette is gay. The world she has known, the world of the church, shuns such behaviour. She was raised to be a missionary by her extremely controlling and zealous mother. Her path was laid out before her. And Jeanette was relatively obedient to begin with. She was ready to accept this life of servitude to God. She didn’t know any different; it’s the only path she believed was open to her. She didn’t look outside it. But life isn’t as simple as that. One day she meets someone who alteres everything. She falls in love. She sees an alternative, and she runs away.
So this is a story about new beginnings; this is a story that shows us that we can break through the bonds of expectancy and be whomever it is we wish to be. We don’t have to sit back and choke on the moral expectancies and norms of a society that controls our faculties. No. We can follow our hearts, and we can do what we know is right. This becomes a tale of self-realisation, one that’s structure reflects the narrative progress of the Bible. It begins with Genesis and Winterson chooses to end it with Ruth, the story that recognises female achievement and is read by modern critics as a celebration of lesbianism.
Jeanette tries to find her own way in life through sexual experimentation and religious rebellion. And by the end, the full autobiographical impact of this is revealed:
“Everyone thinks their own situation most tragic. I am no exception.”
This was certainly a daring first novel, though, that being said, I’ve never really had any inclination to read anything else by this author. (I read this back in 2015.) I did enjoy this, and it is a very good tale, but much of the merit is on the surface level of the writing. It’s very straight forward and clean-cut. I would have liked to see a little bit more depth in the language, and a few less puns on the title. Sometimes we don’t need to explicitly say something for the narrative to carry the meaning.
Overall, it's a quirky little book, full of passion and self-revelation. But, for me, it was missing something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Perhaps the book needed more time to grow and develop, perhaps the story needed to be carried a little further. It’s unusual for a first book, most authors, if they attempted something like this, it would be after they’d already released a few novels and were relatively established. But, again, that doesn’t mean we should always follow the rules. I was certain on giving this four stars before I started writing but, by the time I came to the end of this review, it’s ended up as a three.
May 6, 2015
Thinly-veiled memoir of the author's youth growing up with a religous nutter of a mother and a father whose character was subsumed entirely by his monster of a wife's.
I don't know why some girls become lesbians, presumably most are just made that way, but I do think some become that way through choice. In the book its almost as if there was one thing calculated to offend the mother and the entire community of zealots as a mortal sin, but not offend anyone else in the world, the only possible rebellion for a girl who wasn't at all rebellious by nature.
I derive this theory from the fact that I was all sex-n-drugs-n-rock-n-roll in my youth (and beyond) and my son is Mozart, chess and judo. He's rebelling, and for a not-rebellious kid, he's really found the truly acceptable way to get at me (all that opera played at full volume) but not the world.
Whether it was true or a literary device doesn't matter, the book was hugely entertaining and a damn good read.
I don't know why some girls become lesbians, presumably most are just made that way, but I do think some become that way through choice. In the book its almost as if there was one thing calculated to offend the mother and the entire community of zealots as a mortal sin, but not offend anyone else in the world, the only possible rebellion for a girl who wasn't at all rebellious by nature.
I derive this theory from the fact that I was all sex-n-drugs-n-rock-n-roll in my youth (and beyond) and my son is Mozart, chess and judo. He's rebelling, and for a not-rebellious kid, he's really found the truly acceptable way to get at me (all that opera played at full volume) but not the world.
Whether it was true or a literary device doesn't matter, the book was hugely entertaining and a damn good read.
July 4, 2014
THIS IS A NUMBERS GAME
According to my Goodreads shelf, I have read 490 novels. If Joyce Carol Oates, Marcel Proust and William Gass have anything to do with it, I’ll never make 500. But I want to see that magic number 500 there! I want to be able to say “I have read 500 novels, hear me roar!” So, I’m eating up SHORT novels like a madman right now, never mind the quality, feel the pages! 300? Too long! 250? Still too long!
Oranges is short and sweet; really, short and bittersweet. It was drop dead fabulous from page one. Here is how to write a) an autobiographical novel; b) an autobiographical comic novel; c) an autobiographical lesbian comic novel; d) an autobiographical lesbian religious comic novel. Here is rueful sweet-natured working-class English life without the usual accompanying hauteur you get from writers like Zadie Smith and bloody Martin Amis.
THERE’S ALWAYS A BUT
There are two types of writing here, the flat, banal account of JW’s life, which I loved, and the experimental bits , which I hated. E.g. on p155
On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant5 that grows growing circularwise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart is an orange tree.
And blah blah blah. All a bit portentously groanworthy. But I think JW thought these were actually the best bits, because her writing took off in that direction (The Passion; Sexing the Cherry); so that puts me in the same situation as people who only like The Clash’s first album.
LET IT BE ORANGES… NAKED
Paul McCartney, scandalized at the overdubbings Phil Spector sloshed over the Beatles’ Let It Be album, issued his own de-overdubbed version Let It Be…Naked in 2003. In 2011 JW issued her de-overdubbed version of Oranges called Why be Happy when you Could be Normal? So that will be interesting.
I CONTAIN MULTITUDES
I only just issued a pronouncement that no one under 30 could write a good novel except Emily Bronte. JW was 24 when she wrote Oranges. But cough cough, this is a memoir, really. The rule still stands. Although wait, that means it can’t be counted in my 500 novels. Hmmm…okay, if JW says it’s a novel, it’s a novel!
According to my Goodreads shelf, I have read 490 novels. If Joyce Carol Oates, Marcel Proust and William Gass have anything to do with it, I’ll never make 500. But I want to see that magic number 500 there! I want to be able to say “I have read 500 novels, hear me roar!” So, I’m eating up SHORT novels like a madman right now, never mind the quality, feel the pages! 300? Too long! 250? Still too long!
Oranges is short and sweet; really, short and bittersweet. It was drop dead fabulous from page one. Here is how to write a) an autobiographical novel; b) an autobiographical comic novel; c) an autobiographical lesbian comic novel; d) an autobiographical lesbian religious comic novel. Here is rueful sweet-natured working-class English life without the usual accompanying hauteur you get from writers like Zadie Smith and bloody Martin Amis.
THERE’S ALWAYS A BUT
There are two types of writing here, the flat, banal account of JW’s life, which I loved, and the experimental bits , which I hated. E.g. on p155
On the banks of the Euphrates find a secret garden cunningly walled. There is an entrance, but the entrance is guarded. There is no way in for you. Inside you will find every plant5 that grows growing circularwise like a target. Close to the heart is a sundial and at the heart is an orange tree.
And blah blah blah. All a bit portentously groanworthy. But I think JW thought these were actually the best bits, because her writing took off in that direction (The Passion; Sexing the Cherry); so that puts me in the same situation as people who only like The Clash’s first album.
LET IT BE ORANGES… NAKED
Paul McCartney, scandalized at the overdubbings Phil Spector sloshed over the Beatles’ Let It Be album, issued his own de-overdubbed version Let It Be…Naked in 2003. In 2011 JW issued her de-overdubbed version of Oranges called Why be Happy when you Could be Normal? So that will be interesting.
I CONTAIN MULTITUDES
I only just issued a pronouncement that no one under 30 could write a good novel except Emily Bronte. JW was 24 when she wrote Oranges. But cough cough, this is a memoir, really. The rule still stands. Although wait, that means it can’t be counted in my 500 novels. Hmmm…okay, if JW says it’s a novel, it’s a novel!
July 21, 2024
“There’s no choice that doesn’t mean a loss. But the dog was buried in the clean earth, and the things I had buried were exhuming themselves.”
This is a beautifully done semi-autobiographical work by Winterson detailing a less brutal version of her youth and the falling out between her and her evangelical mother and church because she is a lesbian. She does this through eight chapters, named after the first eight chapters of the bible, detailing the Genesis of her faith to her eventual expulsion to the evangelical church. While this is critical of the church itself, it is never critical of God and well represents how the church’s worldly values and fear of judgement are a major reason as to why she has been expelled from the church. As a lesbian who was raised evangelical, I have some personal thoughts on this as well as critical thoughts, it would be nearly impossible for me to review this without including my own experience and biases.
“The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn’t understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging the facts.”
Winterson does a really cool thing in this book where the parts of the book based in reality seamlessly transition into these fairytale worlds that the narrator has created in order to process her confusion and sense of lostness in a more palatable way. There are multiple stories - some spanning a chapter, others the majority of the book - that all relate directly to the internal battle Jeanette is having while she’s learning that there is something about her that her church will not accept. Through her childlike escapist fantasies of Winnet and Perceval, we see this intense search for meaning and light and the need to leave the precarious safety of home to find understanding of self. At the same time, we see Jeanette forced to reconcile with the fact that she does not belong in the place she grown up, with the people she’s loved all her life. She is forced to understand the conditionality of their love and that leaving is the only way to set herself free.
“I started to cry. My mother looked horrified and rooting in her handbag she gave me an orange. I peeled it to comfort myself, and seeing me a little calmer, everyone glanced at one another and went away.”
Jeanette’s mother is a zealot in the way that all people who were immersed in the evangelical church during that times were. She is unaccommodating, hateful, much more worldly than she proclaims, and, above all, she tries her absolute hardest to make all of the world – especially her adoptive daughter – bend to her Godly will. She is the most present character, besides Jeanette herself, and takes care to mold Jeanette into exactly what she wants, with the penalty of not conforming to her whims being the loss of her conditional love. Whenever Jeanette starts questioning her beliefs or is in any distress, her mother offers her an orange in lieu of any type of emotional comfort. The oranges, while present a couple other times, are mainly associated with her as she feeds Jeanette this strict, suffocating lifestyle that has no room for nuance or understanding. While her mother claims to be righteous, she is like the Pharisees, only concerned with worldly approval when it matters most. She is contrasted with Elsie, one of the only truly accepting people in Jeanette’s church, who is labeled weird for the things she does that bring her closer to God. I really appreciate how the good and pure side of Christianity is shown through Elsie, showing the reader that a closeness to God is not the reason for this evil and closemindedness.
Maybe it’s because they grew up in the same generation, but my Nana reminds me a lot of her mother. She has that missionary map plastered on her wall, won’t drink (and threatened not going to my very evangelical little sister’s wedding at the mention of alcohol *maybe* being offered), and has very strict rules when it comes to the Lord and the way the world should be. We have monthly lunches and try and avoid topics that might be inflammatory to the other. A few days ago, she went on about a rainbow umbrella she bought at the store. By random chance she turned on her television and learned what it signified and promptly returned it because she never wanted to be associated for supporting that. I cried for a while after I dropped her off, forced to confront what I’ve always known – there is no way I won’t lose her if I have to come out. I love her a lot.
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘This world is full of sin.’ We stood on that hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’
The bulk of this book showcases life as an evangelical in England in the 60’s and 70’s and it’s eerily similar to life as an evangelical in the 00’s and 10’s, there’s just less talk of demons and more technology now. This is an incredibly well done look at evangelism and I think the similarities across a continent and 40 years apart are very interesting to take note of, so that’s where I will spend my time in this section. When her mother talks to her about the evils of school, I’m brought back to second grade when much uproar was caused when I brought home an assignment to detail our house’s carbon footprint. For the weeks that followed, there was very serious debate about taking us out of public school and into a private Christian school that wouldn’t teach these “secular” beliefs, ultimately it was finances that protected me from that fate and moving further into the evangelical bubble. The one-off line about evolution made me laugh too, as that was another hot topic that almost pulled us out of school. I got in a lot of trouble in Sunday School when I was 13 and started questioning why our view of the world was different from everyone else’s. Even a few years ago, when my little sister was in college, my dad tried to tell me that her school was progressive and I should be proud of them because their Creationist class discussed evolution to “see both sides” – I cannot imagine the discussion was unbiased in any way.
Like Jeanette, my church would have us go to various locations that didn’t necessarily make sense to spread the gospel. Because we were directly responsible for every soul we encountered and if someone hadn’t heard the gospel they would go to hell, we were adamant that random trips to smaller southern towns were a necessity, looking back and reading her own experiences with similar trips, it feels silly. Even seeing her getting weird looks from her classmates as a child hit hard. We were told that we were responsible for everyone we came in contact with’s souls so we had to try and convert them. I vividly remember bringing tracts to school up through middle school in an effort to convert because I was so worried for my fellow classmates’ souls. They did not like that or think I was very cool. I cannot blame them. Winterson even nailed the not-so-subtle sexism and racism that runs deep.
When I was a young girl, I was told by my Sunday School teacher, Miss Ruby, that some people are destined to go to Hell and there is nothing you can ever do to save them, no amount of learning will change their hearts because God has their fate set in stone. I was a child, but I knew she was talking about me and I tried everything in my power to change that while having extreme night terrors of me being dragged through the fiery pits of Hell or the events of Revelations unfolding. Somehow, even before I was ten years old, I knew that if these things were true I would be there. I still wake up screaming most nights. This is brought to my mind from her pastor’s hellfire and negative view towards everything. It is never pride or happiness about where you are, it’s always the fear of eternal damnation. We see this pretty much every time she interacts with her pastor, who is so passionate that even his wife admonishes him, saying he needs to calm down to not scare the children. When Jeanette gets in trouble at public school for spreading the gospel the only way she knows how (through the fiery pits of Hell) she is threatened for giving the kids nightmares and her response is 'I have nightmares too.' No one cares. She's just seen as the problem, not someone who is actively affected by a negative system. Evangelical services are filled with the fists of God and the fires of Hell. They’re filled with damning everyone that is different than them, looking at the world with hate and a lack of nuance. I haven’t been able to step foot in any church since I was sixteen because of the severe panic attacks I started to have whenever I did. My Grandma used to joke that it was the devil in me having a negative reaction. I wish she hadn’t been so close to the truth.
‘If I keep you, what will happen?’ ‘You’ll have a difficult, different time.’ ‘Is it worth it?’ ‘That’s up to you.’
Becoming ostracized by the only community you’ve really ever known before you have the means to leave your small town is not as terrifying as it is depressing. Jeanette never really has a debate in whether or not she’ll suppress her love for women – she always knew that that was not something she could live without. There is a resilience in Jeanette in her refusal to give in to what society wants. She knows that she cannot give up this thing that is so precious to her and that she knows is not against her God. It’s admirable but it’s also so heartbreaking when you realize that you have to see these painful interactions between her and her community. There is so much internal struggle that we see through her stories and the brief appearance of her small orange demon.
Even after leaving the church, I went a really long time convincing myself I wasn’t gay enough to have any issues and that I could just repress everything because I didn’t want to have to accept that at some point, if I fell in love with a girl or wanted to comfortably be called by my preferred pronouns, I’d have to come out to my family.
”Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself at the starting line.”
The hardest pill to swallow was the last chapter, Ruth. We follow Jeanette and her fairytale alter ego, Winnet, as she moves out from the world she knows that she has to leave everything she knows and have no loose ends, but there is an invisible thread pulling her back to her mother. The past is horrendous and having your eyes opened to the corruption and hate in the evangelical faith (especially towards a group you are a part of) makes it impossible to go back, but the desire for normalcy and to still be loved is so strong. We spend this chapter being told by Winterson how suicidal it would be to go back, then, at the end, she ends up back at her doorstep in a bittersweet way. All of the things she said before are true, but what is more true is that you will always hope that things will be different when you return and you will always feel that emptiness and loss. It’s incredibly silly, but incredibly human. There is no way to stop wanting a family of your own and there’s no way to stop your emotions when you are no longer accepted. It feels especially silly as an atheist, but it is so relatable. I don’t want to leave because I don’t want to say goodbye forever, but it literally goes against all of my values. I am not out to my family because I would rather expend all of my energy holding onto a fraying rope until it snaps, giving myself a little more time with a family I will never be able to return to. That need and desire for things to go back to normal even though it would ultimately be worse for you is such a hard truth that I’m struggling with at the same age that Jeanette was when she published this and it feels both painful and comforting to have these struggles I’m facing written down by someone else.
“I stared at the fire waiting for her to come home. Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own.”
This line really sums up the fear of leaving and accepting who you are at the cost of losing your family. There is no family I can just randomly join, I have friends, but I’ll be alone on holidays while they are celebrating with their families because that’s what holidays are for. I won’t have a niece or nephew that I can see because I won’t have a sister who can see me. Even now, far from marrying, I keep tabs in my mind of which of my friends I would want to play the part of my dad at my wedding and walk me down the aisle and have a pseudo-father-daughter dance with me. It’s exhausting, but it’s a necessity. In her winter collection, Jeanette brings up how she usually spends the actual holidays alone. That both saddens me and gives me hope, because she seems content with it so maybe one day so can I.
This is a beautifully done semi-autobiographical work by Winterson detailing a less brutal version of her youth and the falling out between her and her evangelical mother and church because she is a lesbian. She does this through eight chapters, named after the first eight chapters of the bible, detailing the Genesis of her faith to her eventual expulsion to the evangelical church. While this is critical of the church itself, it is never critical of God and well represents how the church’s worldly values and fear of judgement are a major reason as to why she has been expelled from the church. As a lesbian who was raised evangelical, I have some personal thoughts on this as well as critical thoughts, it would be nearly impossible for me to review this without including my own experience and biases.
“The pillar of cloud was a fog, perplexing and impossible. I didn’t understand the ground rules. The daily world was a world of Strange Notions, without form, and therefore void. I comforted myself as best I could by always rearranging the facts.”
Winterson does a really cool thing in this book where the parts of the book based in reality seamlessly transition into these fairytale worlds that the narrator has created in order to process her confusion and sense of lostness in a more palatable way. There are multiple stories - some spanning a chapter, others the majority of the book - that all relate directly to the internal battle Jeanette is having while she’s learning that there is something about her that her church will not accept. Through her childlike escapist fantasies of Winnet and Perceval, we see this intense search for meaning and light and the need to leave the precarious safety of home to find understanding of self. At the same time, we see Jeanette forced to reconcile with the fact that she does not belong in the place she grown up, with the people she’s loved all her life. She is forced to understand the conditionality of their love and that leaving is the only way to set herself free.
“I started to cry. My mother looked horrified and rooting in her handbag she gave me an orange. I peeled it to comfort myself, and seeing me a little calmer, everyone glanced at one another and went away.”
Jeanette’s mother is a zealot in the way that all people who were immersed in the evangelical church during that times were. She is unaccommodating, hateful, much more worldly than she proclaims, and, above all, she tries her absolute hardest to make all of the world – especially her adoptive daughter – bend to her Godly will. She is the most present character, besides Jeanette herself, and takes care to mold Jeanette into exactly what she wants, with the penalty of not conforming to her whims being the loss of her conditional love. Whenever Jeanette starts questioning her beliefs or is in any distress, her mother offers her an orange in lieu of any type of emotional comfort. The oranges, while present a couple other times, are mainly associated with her as she feeds Jeanette this strict, suffocating lifestyle that has no room for nuance or understanding. While her mother claims to be righteous, she is like the Pharisees, only concerned with worldly approval when it matters most. She is contrasted with Elsie, one of the only truly accepting people in Jeanette’s church, who is labeled weird for the things she does that bring her closer to God. I really appreciate how the good and pure side of Christianity is shown through Elsie, showing the reader that a closeness to God is not the reason for this evil and closemindedness.
Maybe it’s because they grew up in the same generation, but my Nana reminds me a lot of her mother. She has that missionary map plastered on her wall, won’t drink (and threatened not going to my very evangelical little sister’s wedding at the mention of alcohol *maybe* being offered), and has very strict rules when it comes to the Lord and the way the world should be. We have monthly lunches and try and avoid topics that might be inflammatory to the other. A few days ago, she went on about a rainbow umbrella she bought at the store. By random chance she turned on her television and learned what it signified and promptly returned it because she never wanted to be associated for supporting that. I cried for a while after I dropped her off, forced to confront what I’ve always known – there is no way I won’t lose her if I have to come out. I love her a lot.
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘This world is full of sin.’ We stood on that hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’
The bulk of this book showcases life as an evangelical in England in the 60’s and 70’s and it’s eerily similar to life as an evangelical in the 00’s and 10’s, there’s just less talk of demons and more technology now. This is an incredibly well done look at evangelism and I think the similarities across a continent and 40 years apart are very interesting to take note of, so that’s where I will spend my time in this section. When her mother talks to her about the evils of school, I’m brought back to second grade when much uproar was caused when I brought home an assignment to detail our house’s carbon footprint. For the weeks that followed, there was very serious debate about taking us out of public school and into a private Christian school that wouldn’t teach these “secular” beliefs, ultimately it was finances that protected me from that fate and moving further into the evangelical bubble. The one-off line about evolution made me laugh too, as that was another hot topic that almost pulled us out of school. I got in a lot of trouble in Sunday School when I was 13 and started questioning why our view of the world was different from everyone else’s. Even a few years ago, when my little sister was in college, my dad tried to tell me that her school was progressive and I should be proud of them because their Creationist class discussed evolution to “see both sides” – I cannot imagine the discussion was unbiased in any way.
Like Jeanette, my church would have us go to various locations that didn’t necessarily make sense to spread the gospel. Because we were directly responsible for every soul we encountered and if someone hadn’t heard the gospel they would go to hell, we were adamant that random trips to smaller southern towns were a necessity, looking back and reading her own experiences with similar trips, it feels silly. Even seeing her getting weird looks from her classmates as a child hit hard. We were told that we were responsible for everyone we came in contact with’s souls so we had to try and convert them. I vividly remember bringing tracts to school up through middle school in an effort to convert because I was so worried for my fellow classmates’ souls. They did not like that or think I was very cool. I cannot blame them. Winterson even nailed the not-so-subtle sexism and racism that runs deep.
When I was a young girl, I was told by my Sunday School teacher, Miss Ruby, that some people are destined to go to Hell and there is nothing you can ever do to save them, no amount of learning will change their hearts because God has their fate set in stone. I was a child, but I knew she was talking about me and I tried everything in my power to change that while having extreme night terrors of me being dragged through the fiery pits of Hell or the events of Revelations unfolding. Somehow, even before I was ten years old, I knew that if these things were true I would be there. I still wake up screaming most nights. This is brought to my mind from her pastor’s hellfire and negative view towards everything. It is never pride or happiness about where you are, it’s always the fear of eternal damnation. We see this pretty much every time she interacts with her pastor, who is so passionate that even his wife admonishes him, saying he needs to calm down to not scare the children. When Jeanette gets in trouble at public school for spreading the gospel the only way she knows how (through the fiery pits of Hell) she is threatened for giving the kids nightmares and her response is 'I have nightmares too.' No one cares. She's just seen as the problem, not someone who is actively affected by a negative system. Evangelical services are filled with the fists of God and the fires of Hell. They’re filled with damning everyone that is different than them, looking at the world with hate and a lack of nuance. I haven’t been able to step foot in any church since I was sixteen because of the severe panic attacks I started to have whenever I did. My Grandma used to joke that it was the devil in me having a negative reaction. I wish she hadn’t been so close to the truth.
‘If I keep you, what will happen?’ ‘You’ll have a difficult, different time.’ ‘Is it worth it?’ ‘That’s up to you.’
Becoming ostracized by the only community you’ve really ever known before you have the means to leave your small town is not as terrifying as it is depressing. Jeanette never really has a debate in whether or not she’ll suppress her love for women – she always knew that that was not something she could live without. There is a resilience in Jeanette in her refusal to give in to what society wants. She knows that she cannot give up this thing that is so precious to her and that she knows is not against her God. It’s admirable but it’s also so heartbreaking when you realize that you have to see these painful interactions between her and her community. There is so much internal struggle that we see through her stories and the brief appearance of her small orange demon.
Even after leaving the church, I went a really long time convincing myself I wasn’t gay enough to have any issues and that I could just repress everything because I didn’t want to have to accept that at some point, if I fell in love with a girl or wanted to comfortably be called by my preferred pronouns, I’d have to come out to my family.
”Perhaps it was the snow, or the food, or the impossibility of my life that made me hope to go to bed and wake up with the past intact. I seemed to have run in a great circle, and met myself at the starting line.”
The hardest pill to swallow was the last chapter, Ruth. We follow Jeanette and her fairytale alter ego, Winnet, as she moves out from the world she knows that she has to leave everything she knows and have no loose ends, but there is an invisible thread pulling her back to her mother. The past is horrendous and having your eyes opened to the corruption and hate in the evangelical faith (especially towards a group you are a part of) makes it impossible to go back, but the desire for normalcy and to still be loved is so strong. We spend this chapter being told by Winterson how suicidal it would be to go back, then, at the end, she ends up back at her doorstep in a bittersweet way. All of the things she said before are true, but what is more true is that you will always hope that things will be different when you return and you will always feel that emptiness and loss. It’s incredibly silly, but incredibly human. There is no way to stop wanting a family of your own and there’s no way to stop your emotions when you are no longer accepted. It feels especially silly as an atheist, but it is so relatable. I don’t want to leave because I don’t want to say goodbye forever, but it literally goes against all of my values. I am not out to my family because I would rather expend all of my energy holding onto a fraying rope until it snaps, giving myself a little more time with a family I will never be able to return to. That need and desire for things to go back to normal even though it would ultimately be worse for you is such a hard truth that I’m struggling with at the same age that Jeanette was when she published this and it feels both painful and comforting to have these struggles I’m facing written down by someone else.
“I stared at the fire waiting for her to come home. Families, real ones, are chairs and tables and the right number of cups, but I had no means of joining one, and no means of dismissing my own.”
This line really sums up the fear of leaving and accepting who you are at the cost of losing your family. There is no family I can just randomly join, I have friends, but I’ll be alone on holidays while they are celebrating with their families because that’s what holidays are for. I won’t have a niece or nephew that I can see because I won’t have a sister who can see me. Even now, far from marrying, I keep tabs in my mind of which of my friends I would want to play the part of my dad at my wedding and walk me down the aisle and have a pseudo-father-daughter dance with me. It’s exhausting, but it’s a necessity. In her winter collection, Jeanette brings up how she usually spends the actual holidays alone. That both saddens me and gives me hope, because she seems content with it so maybe one day so can I.
June 3, 2024
Rating: 5* of five
The Publisher Says: Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues—"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale.
Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Salvation Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other "heathen state". When Jeanette starts going to school ("The Breeding Ground") and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl ("Unnatural Passions"), she's swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette's existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress.
In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview. --Nicola Perry
My Review: I was twenty-five when I read this for the first time, and now upon re-reading it at fifty-three, I am as impressed and more moved than I was even then.
No news to friends, I had a religious nut mother whose deeply insane reliance on a Manichaean gawd-versus-devil double bind system of understanding the universe screwed me up royally. Winterson, poor lambkin, had it even worse because her deeply insane mother was about as unloving as it's possible for a human being to be. There is nothing of tenderness in this rigid religiosifier.
I can't help myself, reading this in late middle years, from judging the mother more harshly than ever. To raise a child is hard, but to seek the job out by adopting and then to do it so harshly should be actionable. Not everyone should be a parent, and this old buster should not have been.
Winterson's writing is so low-key that it's easy to miss the felicities of expression and the sheer cliffs of peerless perception she scales:
Breathtaking.
Poignant. Also powerful.
If you've read the book at a younger age, revisit it as you would pay a call on your uncomfortably eccentric auntie. If you've never read the book, why ever not? Don't hesitate.
The Publisher Says: Jeanette, the protagonist of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit and the author's namesake, has issues—"unnatural" ones: her adopted mam thinks she's the Chosen one from God; she's beginning to fancy girls; and an orange demon keeps popping into her psyche. Already Jeanette Winterson's semi-autobiographical first novel is not your typical coming-of-age tale.
Brought up in a working-class Pentecostal family, up North, Jeanette follows the path her Mam has set for her. This involves Bible quizzes, a stint as a tambourine-playing Salvation Army officer and a future as a missionary in Africa, or some other "heathen state". When Jeanette starts going to school ("The Breeding Ground") and confides in her mother about her feelings for another girl ("Unnatural Passions"), she's swept up in a feverish frenzy for her tainted soul. Confused, angry and alone, Jeanette strikes out on her own path, that involves a funeral parlour and an ice-cream van. Mixed in with the so-called reality of Jeanette's existence growing up are unconventional fairy tales that transcend the everyday world, subverting the traditional preconceptions of the damsel in distress.
In Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson knits a complicated picture of teenage angst through a series of layered narratives, incorporating and subverting fairytales and myths, to present a coherent whole, within which her stories can stand independently. Imaginative and mischievous, she is a born storyteller, teasing and taunting the reader to reconsider their worldview. --Nicola Perry
My Review: I was twenty-five when I read this for the first time, and now upon re-reading it at fifty-three, I am as impressed and more moved than I was even then.
No news to friends, I had a religious nut mother whose deeply insane reliance on a Manichaean gawd-versus-devil double bind system of understanding the universe screwed me up royally. Winterson, poor lambkin, had it even worse because her deeply insane mother was about as unloving as it's possible for a human being to be. There is nothing of tenderness in this rigid religiosifier.
I can't help myself, reading this in late middle years, from judging the mother more harshly than ever. To raise a child is hard, but to seek the job out by adopting and then to do it so harshly should be actionable. Not everyone should be a parent, and this old buster should not have been.
Winterson's writing is so low-key that it's easy to miss the felicities of expression and the sheer cliffs of peerless perception she scales:
There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name.
Breathtaking.
But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup.
Poignant. Also powerful.
If you've read the book at a younger age, revisit it as you would pay a call on your uncomfortably eccentric auntie. If you've never read the book, why ever not? Don't hesitate.
July 6, 2016
A delicious fruit bowl....
Funny, clever, poetic, quirky, creative well written bittersweet story.
Jeannette's innocence was so real......her heart pure.
A terrific inspiring small book! Amazing how humor- and 'witty-charm' can transform sensitive situations.
Thanks Cecily!
Funny, clever, poetic, quirky, creative well written bittersweet story.
Jeannette's innocence was so real......her heart pure.
A terrific inspiring small book! Amazing how humor- and 'witty-charm' can transform sensitive situations.
Thanks Cecily!
March 5, 2017
A quirky and warm-hearted tale of a girl, Jeanette, growing up in an evangelical household in England with a goal for her to become a missionary. She is well-behaved, a true believer comfortable with this goal. She feels love from her mother, with a lively relationship often lifted with humor and a sense of virtue from righteous community-minded spirit. Anyone who strays from the path of virtue can find forgiveness for succumbing to temptations of the Devil. Her mother works as an administrative assistant for their church’s missionary society and pitches in directly for outreach efforts to convert unbelievers around England and for organizational support of revival meetings. She just knows Jeanette is destined for great things:
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ”The world is full of sin.”
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ”You can change the world.”
Jeanette doesn’t have much to say about her father, but her mother is a rock for her, fighting the good fight:
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 the trees when the appropriate destruction didn’t materialize. Quite often it did, her will or the Lord’s I couldn’t say.
Jeanette is home schooled for a long time. When her hunger for knowledge gets big, she enters the local rural school system and gets a rude awakening. Her religious obsession gets her tagged as odd. Parents complain when their kids get nightmares from Jeanette’s tales about the horrors of demons and fate of the damned. She can’t understand why the religious themes in her art work, like an embroidery project with the words “The Summer is ended and we are not yet saved”, make her a target for ridicule. But she is tough and resilient and soon her broad readings are giving her plenty of fuel to adapt and philosophically argue circles around anyone who marshals ideas against her. Her downfall begins with perplexity about her dreams of marriage in which the bridegroom turns out to be an animal or an empty suit of clothes. At a Bible camp, she befriends a girl named Melanie. At a sleepover, her affections for her take a surprising turn:
We read the Bible as usual, and then told each other how glad we were that the Lord had brought us together. She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened and couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside of me.
As her sin becomes apparent, her mother and the pastor do their best to pray her and shame her out of her sinful trajectory. Rather than getting emotionally destroyed, this girl raised to certitude and trust in her own goodness boldly breaks away. She begins to think her way forward by making up stories, fables, and parables to account for alternative views of reality. She comes to see stories as a core of truth and not to be distinguished as an alternative to historical fact:
It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us they everyone sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing that is certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. …
Some people like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so they know what to believe and what not to believe. …Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belong, in the bright realm of the wallet.
Will she find a way back to her mother’s heart? Will she find a way back to Melanie’s love? How much of this is Winterson’s own history and the love of storytelling by Jeanette in the book a window on the author’s own path to becoming a writer? Reading this first novel was a rewarding complement to the three others I've enjoying. She has a fresh, playful voice, avoids melodramatics, and likes to infuse mythological and philosophical elements into her stories.
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ”The world is full of sin.”
We stood on the hill and my mother said, ”You can change the world.”
Jeanette doesn’t have much to say about her father, but her mother is a rock for her, fighting the good fight:
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 the trees when the appropriate destruction didn’t materialize. Quite often it did, her will or the Lord’s I couldn’t say.
Jeanette is home schooled for a long time. When her hunger for knowledge gets big, she enters the local rural school system and gets a rude awakening. Her religious obsession gets her tagged as odd. Parents complain when their kids get nightmares from Jeanette’s tales about the horrors of demons and fate of the damned. She can’t understand why the religious themes in her art work, like an embroidery project with the words “The Summer is ended and we are not yet saved”, make her a target for ridicule. But she is tough and resilient and soon her broad readings are giving her plenty of fuel to adapt and philosophically argue circles around anyone who marshals ideas against her. Her downfall begins with perplexity about her dreams of marriage in which the bridegroom turns out to be an animal or an empty suit of clothes. At a Bible camp, she befriends a girl named Melanie. At a sleepover, her affections for her take a surprising turn:
We read the Bible as usual, and then told each other how glad we were that the Lord had brought us together. She stroked my head for a long time, and then we hugged and it felt like drowning. Then I was frightened and couldn’t stop. There was something crawling in my belly. I had an octopus inside of me.
As her sin becomes apparent, her mother and the pastor do their best to pray her and shame her out of her sinful trajectory. Rather than getting emotionally destroyed, this girl raised to certitude and trust in her own goodness boldly breaks away. She begins to think her way forward by making up stories, fables, and parables to account for alternative views of reality. She comes to see stories as a core of truth and not to be distinguished as an alternative to historical fact:
It’s a way of explaining the universe while leaving the universe unexplained, it’s a way of keeping it all alive, not boxing it into time. Everyone who tells a story tells it differently, just to remind us they everyone sees it differently. Some people say there are true things to be found, some people say all kinds of things can be proved. I don’t believe them. The only thing that is certain is how complicated it all is, like string full of knots. …
Some people like to separate storytelling which is not fact from history which is fact. They do this so they know what to believe and what not to believe. …Knowing what to believe had its advantages. It built an empire and kept people where they belong, in the bright realm of the wallet.
Will she find a way back to her mother’s heart? Will she find a way back to Melanie’s love? How much of this is Winterson’s own history and the love of storytelling by Jeanette in the book a window on the author’s own path to becoming a writer? Reading this first novel was a rewarding complement to the three others I've enjoying. She has a fresh, playful voice, avoids melodramatics, and likes to infuse mythological and philosophical elements into her stories.
January 15, 2013
When I was a child, I had found a pair of gloves in the middle of the street in my cul-de-sac. They were black and worn with a little embroidered heart at each wrist. I slipped them on and flexed my fingers, amazed at how nicely they fit. I took them home and put them in my sock drawer, only taking them out on Thursdays for my bike ride down the street to piano lessons.
This book is exactly like those gloves. I found this book while on a field trip for pre-college English class, crammed in backward on a shelf between two books by Anais Nin. The title made me smile, so I turned to the first page and read the introduction. It is safe to say that Jeanette Winterson’s writing wormed its way into my heart rather fast.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a great, great read. Winterson beautifully mixes religious theology with budding sexuality, curiosity and identity. It was nice to watch Jeanette (the main character) grow along with the conflict of accepting her "demon". In a lot of ways it reminds me of the documentary For The Bible Tells Me So .
This book is exactly like those gloves. I found this book while on a field trip for pre-college English class, crammed in backward on a shelf between two books by Anais Nin. The title made me smile, so I turned to the first page and read the introduction. It is safe to say that Jeanette Winterson’s writing wormed its way into my heart rather fast.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is a great, great read. Winterson beautifully mixes religious theology with budding sexuality, curiosity and identity. It was nice to watch Jeanette (the main character) grow along with the conflict of accepting her "demon". In a lot of ways it reminds me of the documentary For The Bible Tells Me So .
August 11, 2015
"Oranges is an experimental novel," says Jeanette Winterson in her thoroughly obnoxious introduction: "its interests are anti-linear...You can read in spirals." It's nothing of the sort. It's a standard semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story, interspersed with some sort of Arthurian malarkey.
Coming out stories from the 80s and 90s aren't aging terribly well; they're too specifically grounded in that period. David Sedaris is a little wincey in hindsight, too. But this one from 1985 is fine as they go. The conflict between the protagonist's burgeoning gayness and her evangelist nutjob mother / all her friends / own beliefs offers plenty of easy jokes and drama. I didn't always fully buy it; some of the moments that should have been most affecting, either happy or awful, seemed to not quite land their punches. But I was engaged.
The Arthurian stuff is very lame. Obvious, immature, trying too hard. Winterson's trying to make her protagonist's journey into her sexuality into a knight's quest, all mythic and metaphorical, and it's silly. It reads like a college student's first shot at writing, which is more or less what it is.
And then that intro! My, Winterson does take herself seriously! "Oranges is a threatening novel," she says, slopping mortar on her own edifice. "It dares to suggest that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's." Again, this is badly dated but one tries to give it the benefit of its time. But then - "Worse, it does these things with such humor and lightness that those disposed not to agree find that they do." The whole intro is like this, embarrassingly self-aggrandizing. Her emperor was skimpily dressed already. To see it through her eyes, to realize that she sees it all in shining armor...well, now she's gone and made it naked.
Coming out stories from the 80s and 90s aren't aging terribly well; they're too specifically grounded in that period. David Sedaris is a little wincey in hindsight, too. But this one from 1985 is fine as they go. The conflict between the protagonist's burgeoning gayness and her evangelist nutjob mother / all her friends / own beliefs offers plenty of easy jokes and drama. I didn't always fully buy it; some of the moments that should have been most affecting, either happy or awful, seemed to not quite land their punches. But I was engaged.
The Arthurian stuff is very lame. Obvious, immature, trying too hard. Winterson's trying to make her protagonist's journey into her sexuality into a knight's quest, all mythic and metaphorical, and it's silly. It reads like a college student's first shot at writing, which is more or less what it is.
And then that intro! My, Winterson does take herself seriously! "Oranges is a threatening novel," she says, slopping mortar on her own edifice. "It dares to suggest that what makes life difficult for homosexuals is not their perversity but other people's." Again, this is badly dated but one tries to give it the benefit of its time. But then - "Worse, it does these things with such humor and lightness that those disposed not to agree find that they do." The whole intro is like this, embarrassingly self-aggrandizing. Her emperor was skimpily dressed already. To see it through her eyes, to realize that she sees it all in shining armor...well, now she's gone and made it naked.
November 16, 2020
4.5★
(Read and reviewed February 9, 2017)
UPDATE:
I listened to an absolutely delightful 2016 podcast of Richard Fidler's conversation with Winterson where she openly discusses her childhood, family, and upbringing.
There seems to be no bitterness, rather a lot of humour and understanding. Have a listen. I love hearing her talk anyway. :) It's here:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2...
-----
This book of fiction won the Whitbread Award (now the Costa) for first novel, but it appears to be an autobiographical memoir, judging by what the author has described at other times of her family and her growing up.
Jeanette (same name) is adopted (almost kidnapped, it would seem) by Pentecostal evangelist parents and taught how to read from the Bible. By that, I mean she learns her reading using that book, and she also learns how to read and preach from the Bible at meetings, and very successful she is too, saving souls left, right and centre. Her mother considers it her job to train the child to be a missionary - as if she's selected her own little servant.
We never see much of her father, but her mother is a real piece of work. The only time her real mother turns up, Jeanette is sent out of the room, listens through the wall and hears lots of noise but is none the wiser. Jeanette asks about her real mother.
And she never did, as far as we know. Jeanette grows up smart and questioning, with a keen interest in science and peculiar creatures. She’s a disturbing mystery to teachers, because when asked to write about animals, she chooses hoopoos (I had to look them up), rock badgers and shrimp, not quite what they are expecting. But she learned to read from Deuteronomy, which is full of animals, and made her eager to learn more about interesting ones. As for science:
Mother adores the missionary priest they support who looks like Errol Flynn. When he occasionally comes back and swans through town, she gets quite girly around him. She seems to have had a colourful past herself, and keeps warning Jeanette to stay out of trouble.
Poor kid has no friends, but when she finds a kindred soul, who happens to be a pretty girl, they become very close and it turns out to be her first real crush. The feeling is mutual, but Jeanette is careful. By this time, she's aware the kids are pairing off boy-girl, but she doesn't care for the boys and an old woman has read her palm and announced she will never marry - never sit still.
When she goes as usual to collect her comic from a paper shop run by two older, unmarried women, they invite her to go with them to the seaside. But Mother immediately cancels the comic subscription and forbids Jeanette from returning with no explanation.
With her new friend, she has an idea of what these unnatural passions might be. Meanwhile, she throws herself into the evangelical life, and a dreary one it must be. She doesn’t chafe and rebel too much in her youth, because it’s all she knows. She prays and preaches and sings carols and hands out religious tracts.
As she gets older, she bumps up against all kinds of criticism. Her needlework teacher is horrified at her sampler all in black and white with a picture of the damned in the corner.
I always enjoy Winterson’s writing, and I’ve heard her tell her story in interviews but hadn’t yet read this or Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? to see how she wrote about her past. How much of this is fiction and how much is her own, I don’t know, but it’s unusual, intriguing and well-written.
She describes the church deciding to cleanse her, save her through exorcism, and all sorts of strange goings-on. This seems to have led to dreams or hallucinations incorporating King Arthur and other mythology which added nothing to the story for me but might for a more discerning student of the book.
I suspect these are the hoopoos referred to in the book.
http://www.thewonderofbirds.com/hoopo...
(Read and reviewed February 9, 2017)
UPDATE:
I listened to an absolutely delightful 2016 podcast of Richard Fidler's conversation with Winterson where she openly discusses her childhood, family, and upbringing.
There seems to be no bitterness, rather a lot of humour and understanding. Have a listen. I love hearing her talk anyway. :) It's here:
http://www.abc.net.au/local/stories/2...
-----
This book of fiction won the Whitbread Award (now the Costa) for first novel, but it appears to be an autobiographical memoir, judging by what the author has described at other times of her family and her growing up.
Jeanette (same name) is adopted (almost kidnapped, it would seem) by Pentecostal evangelist parents and taught how to read from the Bible. By that, I mean she learns her reading using that book, and she also learns how to read and preach from the Bible at meetings, and very successful she is too, saving souls left, right and centre. Her mother considers it her job to train the child to be a missionary - as if she's selected her own little servant.
We never see much of her father, but her mother is a real piece of work. The only time her real mother turns up, Jeanette is sent out of the room, listens through the wall and hears lots of noise but is none the wiser. Jeanette asks about her real mother.
‘I’m your mother . . . she was a carrying case.’
‘I wanted to see her.’
‘She’s gone and she’ll never come back.’
And she never did, as far as we know. Jeanette grows up smart and questioning, with a keen interest in science and peculiar creatures. She’s a disturbing mystery to teachers, because when asked to write about animals, she chooses hoopoos (I had to look them up), rock badgers and shrimp, not quite what they are expecting. But she learned to read from Deuteronomy, which is full of animals, and made her eager to learn more about interesting ones. As for science:
“I learnt that it rains when clouds collide with a high building, like a steeple, or a cathedral; the impact punctures them, and everybody underneath gets wet. This was why, in the old days, when the only tall buildings were holy, people used to say cleanliness is next to godliness. The more godly your town, the more high buildings you'd have, and the more rain you'd get.”
Mother adores the missionary priest they support who looks like Errol Flynn. When he occasionally comes back and swans through town, she gets quite girly around him. She seems to have had a colourful past herself, and keeps warning Jeanette to stay out of trouble.
Poor kid has no friends, but when she finds a kindred soul, who happens to be a pretty girl, they become very close and it turns out to be her first real crush. The feeling is mutual, but Jeanette is careful. By this time, she's aware the kids are pairing off boy-girl, but she doesn't care for the boys and an old woman has read her palm and announced she will never marry - never sit still.
When she goes as usual to collect her comic from a paper shop run by two older, unmarried women, they invite her to go with them to the seaside. But Mother immediately cancels the comic subscription and forbids Jeanette from returning with no explanation.
“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.”
With her new friend, she has an idea of what these unnatural passions might be. Meanwhile, she throws herself into the evangelical life, and a dreary one it must be. She doesn’t chafe and rebel too much in her youth, because it’s all she knows. She prays and preaches and sings carols and hands out religious tracts.
As she gets older, she bumps up against all kinds of criticism. Her needlework teacher is horrified at her sampler all in black and white with a picture of the damned in the corner.
“'GO BACK TO YOUR DESK!'
What could I do? My needlework teacher suffered from a problem of vision. She recognised things according to expectation and environment. If you were in a particular place, you expected to see particular things. Sheep and hills, sea and fish; if there was an elephant in the supermarket, she'd either not see it at all, or call it Mrs Jones and talk about fishcakes. But most likely, she'd do what most people do when confronted with something they don't understand:
Panic.
What constitutes a problem is not the thing, or the environment where we find the thing, but the conjunction of the two; something unexpected in a usual place (our favourite aunt in our favourite poker parlour) or something usual in an unexpected place (our favourite poker in our favourite aunt).”
I always enjoy Winterson’s writing, and I’ve heard her tell her story in interviews but hadn’t yet read this or Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? to see how she wrote about her past. How much of this is fiction and how much is her own, I don’t know, but it’s unusual, intriguing and well-written.
She describes the church deciding to cleanse her, save her through exorcism, and all sorts of strange goings-on. This seems to have led to dreams or hallucinations incorporating King Arthur and other mythology which added nothing to the story for me but might for a more discerning student of the book.
I suspect these are the hoopoos referred to in the book.
http://www.thewonderofbirds.com/hoopo...
July 29, 2015
I've heard that her more recent take on the same material Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal is even better. If that's true, I'm in for a truly superlative treat, because I loved this book to the bones. I want to read it again and again to savour its sweet delights.
Maybe Laura Doan's essay 'Sexing the Postmodern', about Winterson's work and theme development over this and two subsequent novels The Passion and Sexing the Cherry gave me a hunger to read this that made it taste so good ('hunger is the best sauce'). Maybe I felt along with Jeanette so keenly because working-class northern-ness and being in trouble for being queer and weird are familiar territory. Maybe because I grew up around Christianity from a position of looking on in mixed horror, contempt, admiration and amusement I was primed to laugh at all the jokes.
Being working class, living in scarcity, means sharing space, often uncomfortably. Jeanette and her father go outside to the bathroom for respite. The Sally Army banish Jeanette's inept tambourinists from their shared concert. Death meets ice cream. Poison meets progress. Unnatural passions.
There is a combination of elastic lightness and looseness of expression that makes for tiggerish bounding jollity, a feast of poetic allusions to lesbian love, and archly spoken cycles through remade mythology and fairytale. I don't feel this as bildungsroman; Jeanette travels around in her life as in a tableau vivant rather than being changed by or absorbing the world. Revelatory moments and drastic, transformative events seem carved in niches. Jeanette passes them, points them out, sails on.
Without this distancing and the comic tone to leaven, it would probably be an unbearable story. As straight memoir I don’t think I could read it, but of course it's not straight in any sense, it's subjectively and structurally queer. It evades the snares of a heterosexist culture and its language by turning them aside: 'to the pure all things are pure' cries Jeanette of her love for Melanie, convinced it must, as all good things, be holy.
Maybe Laura Doan's essay 'Sexing the Postmodern', about Winterson's work and theme development over this and two subsequent novels The Passion and Sexing the Cherry gave me a hunger to read this that made it taste so good ('hunger is the best sauce'). Maybe I felt along with Jeanette so keenly because working-class northern-ness and being in trouble for being queer and weird are familiar territory. Maybe because I grew up around Christianity from a position of looking on in mixed horror, contempt, admiration and amusement I was primed to laugh at all the jokes.
Being working class, living in scarcity, means sharing space, often uncomfortably. Jeanette and her father go outside to the bathroom for respite. The Sally Army banish Jeanette's inept tambourinists from their shared concert. Death meets ice cream. Poison meets progress. Unnatural passions.
There is a combination of elastic lightness and looseness of expression that makes for tiggerish bounding jollity, a feast of poetic allusions to lesbian love, and archly spoken cycles through remade mythology and fairytale. I don't feel this as bildungsroman; Jeanette travels around in her life as in a tableau vivant rather than being changed by or absorbing the world. Revelatory moments and drastic, transformative events seem carved in niches. Jeanette passes them, points them out, sails on.
Without this distancing and the comic tone to leaven, it would probably be an unbearable story. As straight memoir I don’t think I could read it, but of course it's not straight in any sense, it's subjectively and structurally queer. It evades the snares of a heterosexist culture and its language by turning them aside: 'to the pure all things are pure' cries Jeanette of her love for Melanie, convinced it must, as all good things, be holy.
Perhaps the event has an unassailable truth. God saw it. God knows. But I am not God. And so when someone tells me what they heard or saw, I believe them, and I believe their friend who also saw, but not in the same way, and I can put these accounts together and I will not have a seamless wonder but a sandwich laced with mustard of my own
August 19, 2019
Jeanette Winterson is masterful in the way she captures her readers. She has such talent, and is one of the most unique writers that I have ever had the privilege to read. I would gladly read anything, with Winterson's name attached to it.
As this is Winterson's first acclaimed novel, I was pleasantly surprised to find how beautiful it was. It was written with honesty, innocence and was told in black and white. The story is based on Winterson's time with her Mother, and the goal for Jeanette to eventually become a missionary. Jeanette meets a girl, and really, it ends in a bittersweet way.
I think this book is deliciously entertaining, funny and I always admire the way Winterson manages to weave physiological and mythological events into her stories. I just love her books.
As this is Winterson's first acclaimed novel, I was pleasantly surprised to find how beautiful it was. It was written with honesty, innocence and was told in black and white. The story is based on Winterson's time with her Mother, and the goal for Jeanette to eventually become a missionary. Jeanette meets a girl, and really, it ends in a bittersweet way.
I think this book is deliciously entertaining, funny and I always admire the way Winterson manages to weave physiological and mythological events into her stories. I just love her books.
December 22, 2021
I was amazed at how much this reminded of Boyhood by J. M. Coetzee, right down to the protagonist's—uhm—complicated relationship with her mother. However, the autobiographical narrator in Oranges outpaces Boyhood's John by being allowed to grow up, and this gives greater scope/depth to the book as a whole. The mother in this one certainly takes the cake, and she probably shares much with the mother in a certain popular horror novel which I have yet to read—okay, maybe not quite. Winterson's working class Manchester is a character in itself and is full of Beryl Bainbridge-y characters who are a pure delight. Even though Oranges chronicles a journey of lesbian self discovery, it is incredibly funny and relatable and a book I wish I had read as a teenager. Like many I'm no stranger to having someone throw God in my face as a rebuke, but God, as it turns out, must be busy somewhere else as he hasn't struck me down yet.
August 9, 2021
on three levels—religious (evangelism), cultural (british ppl...), and historical (the eighties, probably)—the writing in this book eluded me. i had to take a break after the first 50 pages because my brain felt like it was doing complex math. i do enjoy a little googling in service of better understanding a text, but with oranges are not the only fruit the stopping and starting got excessive. which is less the fault of jeanette winterson and more a difference in tastes/experiences.
more than that, though, this is one of those books whose message (thematically speaking) is more important than its deliverers (the characters). i say that because the characters rarely ever transcend the plot functions they perform; they feel like they exist to serve one purpose (the theme). developmental leaps might be nonexistent (in the case of characters only significant in name), or so sudden you have no means of tracking the gradual shift someone makes from one point to another. the main character's love interests in particular are indistinguishable from one another, that's how intensely this book fails in its character writing.
beyond the syntactical (and grammatical) chaos, oranges are not the only fruit purports to be a complex piece of work with nonlinear stylings, when i feel that's something of an overstatement. the constant anglophone fairy tale interludes are a good example of this text trying and failing to emulate complexity through simple allegory. again, winterson prioritizes message over characters—and even prose.
this one was a boring time! 💔
more than that, though, this is one of those books whose message (thematically speaking) is more important than its deliverers (the characters). i say that because the characters rarely ever transcend the plot functions they perform; they feel like they exist to serve one purpose (the theme). developmental leaps might be nonexistent (in the case of characters only significant in name), or so sudden you have no means of tracking the gradual shift someone makes from one point to another. the main character's love interests in particular are indistinguishable from one another, that's how intensely this book fails in its character writing.
beyond the syntactical (and grammatical) chaos, oranges are not the only fruit purports to be a complex piece of work with nonlinear stylings, when i feel that's something of an overstatement. the constant anglophone fairy tale interludes are a good example of this text trying and failing to emulate complexity through simple allegory. again, winterson prioritizes message over characters—and even prose.
this one was a boring time! 💔
June 21, 2016
This story is about a young lesbian girl, trying to navigate her way through a family, a background, and an era that refuses to recognize her, refuses to recognize her sexual identity and accept her as she is. Adopted, raised in a strict, religious household by a mother who was severe and domineering, this novel is partly autobiographical. This is a damn good book, first class story telling that you wouldn't expect to find in a first novel. Four solid stars.
January 11, 2021
Oranges is a comforting novel. Its heroine is someone on the outside of life. She’s poor, she’s working class but she has to deal with the big questions that cut across class, culture and colour. Everyone, at some time in their life, must choose whether to stay with a ready-made world that may be safe but which is also limiting, or to push forward, often past the frontiers of commonsense, into a personal place, unknown and untried.
Winterson writes in her introduction to Oranges, and in this semi-autobiographical novel, that's the clincher.
Before Jeanette Winterson became one of the better known names in lesbian literature, she was a devout Christian, being groomed for missionary work by her deeply religious and very obviously Christian zealot of a mother. Before Winterson graduated from Oxford and began to teach writing at the University of Manchester, she was practically illiterate - home-schooled by her mother, and her education, limited to religious texts. Winterson writes her own story as a novel, as fiction, because, as she says, fiction is easier to accept than fact. And also, for whatever reason, fiction has a greater outreach, or so I believe. Fiction needs its specifics, its anchors. It needs also to pass beyond them. It needs to be weighed down with characters we can touch and know, it needs also to fly right through them into a larger, universal space.
The chapters in the book are divided as chapters are in the Old Testament; from Genesis to Ruth. In Genesis, as the Biblical Genesis talks about the Origin, or history of mankind, Winterson talks about the story of her origins and her history, her background - her adoption, her daily routine that came to be, and her involvement in the church. She talks about how she was groomed to be a missionary, and how that was the only life she knew. For her second chapter, which she calls Exodus after the Book of Exodus, Jeanette's mother is forced into putting Jeanette into a school - literally, a movement from homeschooling to regular schooling. In the Book of Leviticus, the essence is mostly preaching - it is about rituals and morality, and about staying true to Christian principles.
In Oranges, Leviticus plays quite the same role as in the Bible. In that, Jeanette's mother preaches about morality and religion and righteousness, while Jeanette talks about her mother's role in Church. Her mother also gives Jeanette instructions, advice on what she needs to do to fulfill her destiny as a missionary. One of the defining features of Numbers is the loss of faith in god by men, and their subsequent smiting. In Numbers, in a way, Jeanette perhaps starts losing faith in god. But more importantly, she loses faith in her mother for having lied to her. Just like the Israelis start doubting god for putting them through the tests that he did, subconsciously, Jeanette begins decoupling from the oppressive Bible herself, and for her, it starts by falling in love. With a girl.
Deuteronomy. Part 5. A large part of the Biblical Deuteronomy deals with the journey aspect of Moses's journey and the Promised Land. In Oranges, Winterson focuses on the act of travel and how it relates to the larger picture. About how it enhances curiosity and discovery. Winterson also talks about another kind of promised land; about discovery of new lands, and about those lost cities that inspire stories, cities like El Dorado and Atlantis.
In Joshua, Jeanette is exorcised for her "Unnatural Passions", and in Judges, her mother forces her to move out. The former perhaps has links to God instructing Joshua as it correlates to her demons instructing her, while the latter seems to draw from Israelis being oppressed by their kings, their judges; just like Jeanette is oppressed by her mother. In Judges, Israel is left to fend for itself after the events of the book, just like Jeanette is left to fend for herself after moving out. Ruth ultimately seems like a fitting end to this treatise because its eponymous book in the Old Testament remains among the most progressive of the Biblical books.
Oranges is a heartbreaking, yet hopeful story of a young girl who discovers that she is more than the oppressive, fanatically religious household she grew up in. Jeanette is severely oppressed by her fanatically religious mother and their equally fanatical community. A community that shuns people for having sex on a Sunday. A community that has taken upon itself to convert anyone who isn't a Christian. A community full of missionaries.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Jeanette's mother is a strong character, both in terms of her role in the book, and in Jeanette's life. Just, it's not a positive kind of strong. She's domineering and opinionated - while also being willfully judgemental and ignorant. She judged the poor for being too poor, and the rich for being too rich. 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.
She spoke ill of her next door neighbours for having too much sex, and two random women because she suspected (rightly) that they were lesbians. She was just another religious fanatic waiting for the end of the world while forcing her views on everyone else. Her singular aim in life? That Jeanette become a missionary. We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘This world is full of sin.’ We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’ Her husband was far more docile and easygoing, but for the most part, because he had no choice, and also knew that raising his voice was futile. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it depressed him.
Since I was born I had assumed that the world ran on very simple lines, like a larger version of our church. Now I was finding that even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem.
Jeanette's mother was, of course, a Creationist. ‘Did you hear that?’ she demanded, and poked her head round the kitchen door. ‘The family life of snails, it’s an Abomination, it’s like saying we come from monkeys.’ And I'm sure she did not believe in educating the people about sex. Her home-schooling of her daughter resulted in her daughter being woefully backward in class. Her religious views - in her daughter terrifying the living daylights of her classmates. Jeanette's essays were inspired by Hell and other Biblical phenomena, as were her projects. I felt terrible for her, because her mother's lifestyle, so to speak, made her not only friendless, but also the butt of all jokes in school. Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded; there’s a formula, a secret, I don’t know what, that people who have been to public school or Brownies seem to understand.
Jeanette's mother's faith, or rather, fanaticism went to the extent that she refused to admit her daughter to the hospital when she fell sick. And had to be persuaded (by that, I mean someone else got Jeanette admitted) to do so. In the hospital, as at home, Jeanette was given oranges to keep her energy up. Because oranges are the only fruit. Her friend Elise, old, eccentric, and surprisingly more open minded than Jeanette's mother kept her company. Elise was lovable, despite all. Elsie got very cross. She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn’t exist unless you looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.
Jeanette finds solace in books, and one day, quite by accident, as it always does, falls in love. With a girl. Of course, it doesn't sit well with the community, and she's exorcised before being kicked out for her 'sins'. She does odd jobs to support herself. She moves to a nearby city, but the questions plague her. Jeanette accepts herself for who she is, but doesn't renounce her faith, in that, she starts believing in a more abstract idea of god. Which, I'm agnostic, so I don't care, but it must have been a real task to reconcile that gap between who she was, who she is, and who she would become. I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
Oranges may seem very simple at its outset, but it has to it layers. The subtle Biblical references interspersed with the more obvious ones. The degrees to all the characters. Granted, they're based from facts, but the nuances, the layers to what is a very simple story, make this book spectacular.
Oranges is comforting not because it offers any easy answers but because it tackles difficult questions. Once you can talk about what troubles you, you are some way towards handling it.
Before Jeanette Winterson became one of the better known names in lesbian literature, she was a devout Christian, being groomed for missionary work by her deeply religious and very obviously Christian zealot of a mother. Before Winterson graduated from Oxford and began to teach writing at the University of Manchester, she was practically illiterate - home-schooled by her mother, and her education, limited to religious texts. Winterson writes her own story as a novel, as fiction, because, as she says, fiction is easier to accept than fact. And also, for whatever reason, fiction has a greater outreach, or so I believe. Fiction needs its specifics, its anchors. It needs also to pass beyond them. It needs to be weighed down with characters we can touch and know, it needs also to fly right through them into a larger, universal space.
The chapters in the book are divided as chapters are in the Old Testament; from Genesis to Ruth. In Genesis, as the Biblical Genesis talks about the Origin, or history of mankind, Winterson talks about the story of her origins and her history, her background - her adoption, her daily routine that came to be, and her involvement in the church. She talks about how she was groomed to be a missionary, and how that was the only life she knew. For her second chapter, which she calls Exodus after the Book of Exodus, Jeanette's mother is forced into putting Jeanette into a school - literally, a movement from homeschooling to regular schooling. In the Book of Leviticus, the essence is mostly preaching - it is about rituals and morality, and about staying true to Christian principles.
In Oranges, Leviticus plays quite the same role as in the Bible. In that, Jeanette's mother preaches about morality and religion and righteousness, while Jeanette talks about her mother's role in Church. Her mother also gives Jeanette instructions, advice on what she needs to do to fulfill her destiny as a missionary. One of the defining features of Numbers is the loss of faith in god by men, and their subsequent smiting. In Numbers, in a way, Jeanette perhaps starts losing faith in god. But more importantly, she loses faith in her mother for having lied to her. Just like the Israelis start doubting god for putting them through the tests that he did, subconsciously, Jeanette begins decoupling from the oppressive Bible herself, and for her, it starts by falling in love. With a girl.
Deuteronomy. Part 5. A large part of the Biblical Deuteronomy deals with the journey aspect of Moses's journey and the Promised Land. In Oranges, Winterson focuses on the act of travel and how it relates to the larger picture. About how it enhances curiosity and discovery. Winterson also talks about another kind of promised land; about discovery of new lands, and about those lost cities that inspire stories, cities like El Dorado and Atlantis.
In Joshua, Jeanette is exorcised for her "Unnatural Passions", and in Judges, her mother forces her to move out. The former perhaps has links to God instructing Joshua as it correlates to her demons instructing her, while the latter seems to draw from Israelis being oppressed by their kings, their judges; just like Jeanette is oppressed by her mother. In Judges, Israel is left to fend for itself after the events of the book, just like Jeanette is left to fend for herself after moving out. Ruth ultimately seems like a fitting end to this treatise because its eponymous book in the Old Testament remains among the most progressive of the Biblical books.
Oranges is a heartbreaking, yet hopeful story of a young girl who discovers that she is more than the oppressive, fanatically religious household she grew up in. Jeanette is severely oppressed by her fanatically religious mother and their equally fanatical community. A community that shuns people for having sex on a Sunday. A community that has taken upon itself to convert anyone who isn't a Christian. A community full of missionaries.
She had never heard of mixed feelings. There were friends and there were enemies. Jeanette's mother is a strong character, both in terms of her role in the book, and in Jeanette's life. Just, it's not a positive kind of strong. She's domineering and opinionated - while also being willfully judgemental and ignorant. She judged the poor for being too poor, and the rich for being too rich. 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.
She spoke ill of her next door neighbours for having too much sex, and two random women because she suspected (rightly) that they were lesbians. She was just another religious fanatic waiting for the end of the world while forcing her views on everyone else. Her singular aim in life? That Jeanette become a missionary. We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘This world is full of sin.’ We stood on the hill and my mother said, ‘You can change the world.’ Her husband was far more docile and easygoing, but for the most part, because he had no choice, and also knew that raising his voice was futile. Her husband was an easy-going man, but I knew it depressed him.
Since I was born I had assumed that the world ran on very simple lines, like a larger version of our church. Now I was finding that even the church was sometimes confused. This was a problem.
Jeanette's mother was, of course, a Creationist. ‘Did you hear that?’ she demanded, and poked her head round the kitchen door. ‘The family life of snails, it’s an Abomination, it’s like saying we come from monkeys.’ And I'm sure she did not believe in educating the people about sex. Her home-schooling of her daughter resulted in her daughter being woefully backward in class. Her religious views - in her daughter terrifying the living daylights of her classmates. Jeanette's essays were inspired by Hell and other Biblical phenomena, as were her projects. I felt terrible for her, because her mother's lifestyle, so to speak, made her not only friendless, but also the butt of all jokes in school. Over the years I did my best to win a prize; some wish to better the world and still scorn it. But I never succeeded; there’s a formula, a secret, I don’t know what, that people who have been to public school or Brownies seem to understand.
Jeanette's mother's faith, or rather, fanaticism went to the extent that she refused to admit her daughter to the hospital when she fell sick. And had to be persuaded (by that, I mean someone else got Jeanette admitted) to do so. In the hospital, as at home, Jeanette was given oranges to keep her energy up. Because oranges are the only fruit. Her friend Elise, old, eccentric, and surprisingly more open minded than Jeanette's mother kept her company. Elise was lovable, despite all. Elsie got very cross. She was an absolutist, and had no time for people who thought cows didn’t exist unless you looked at them. Once a thing was created, it was valid for all time. Its value went not up nor down.
Jeanette finds solace in books, and one day, quite by accident, as it always does, falls in love. With a girl. Of course, it doesn't sit well with the community, and she's exorcised before being kicked out for her 'sins'. She does odd jobs to support herself. She moves to a nearby city, but the questions plague her. Jeanette accepts herself for who she is, but doesn't renounce her faith, in that, she starts believing in a more abstract idea of god. Which, I'm agnostic, so I don't care, but it must have been a real task to reconcile that gap between who she was, who she is, and who she would become. I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. Words for every occasion. The words work. They do what they’re supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out because they are troubled by demons.
Oranges may seem very simple at its outset, but it has to it layers. The subtle Biblical references interspersed with the more obvious ones. The degrees to all the characters. Granted, they're based from facts, but the nuances, the layers to what is a very simple story, make this book spectacular.
Oranges is comforting not because it offers any easy answers but because it tackles difficult questions. Once you can talk about what troubles you, you are some way towards handling it.
April 24, 2021
My overall impression of this author's autobiographies and of this unending whine-fest is that the author felt cheated.
She did not win the adoption lottery pool.
She was, instead, adopted by lower income, fundamentalist older parents and she was ashamed of her home.
When she finally meets her birth mother, she finds fault with her too, and is angry at her for choosing to keep her biological brother over her. Most of her writing is one huge gripe after the other and any feelings of compassion I had were for the adoptive mother. I had to read this awful book because it was a Book Club selection. I thought: what a waste. This author can write, and what she chooses to write about are these paltry "pity me" books? Narcissistic, entitled... the list of negative adjectives for these books and the writer are legion.
Note: I chanced upon the second installment of her autobiography while browsing at my local library. I haphazardly opened it and came upon a passage where she ridicules her mother for calling her out on the lies in the first books, then starts in again at ripping her adoptive mother's character to shreds.
Just appalling!
She did not win the adoption lottery pool.
She was, instead, adopted by lower income, fundamentalist older parents and she was ashamed of her home.
When she finally meets her birth mother, she finds fault with her too, and is angry at her for choosing to keep her biological brother over her. Most of her writing is one huge gripe after the other and any feelings of compassion I had were for the adoptive mother. I had to read this awful book because it was a Book Club selection. I thought: what a waste. This author can write, and what she chooses to write about are these paltry "pity me" books? Narcissistic, entitled... the list of negative adjectives for these books and the writer are legion.
Note: I chanced upon the second installment of her autobiography while browsing at my local library. I haphazardly opened it and came upon a passage where she ridicules her mother for calling her out on the lies in the first books, then starts in again at ripping her adoptive mother's character to shreds.
Just appalling!
February 23, 2016
Semi-autobiographical tale of adopted Jess growing up in an austere evangelical family, rebelling religiously, socially and sexually as she tries to find her way in life. Seemed quite scandalous when I first read it, but much sadder and more touching now.
For the truer, grittier, more analytical version, see "Why be happy when you can be normal?": http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....
There also seem to be significant autobiographical aspects to "Lighthousekeeping", as explained in my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
For the truer, grittier, more analytical version, see "Why be happy when you can be normal?": http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/....
There also seem to be significant autobiographical aspects to "Lighthousekeeping", as explained in my review: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
August 26, 2019
Walls protect and walls limit. It is in the nature of walls that they should fall. That walls should fall is the consequence of blowing your own trumpet. (page 113)
After recently reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and hearing conflicting opinions on whether it was now ‘necessary’ to read the much-earlier Oranges, I decided "why not?"
The beginning of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? covers the same territory as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but the two works are quite different, and I don’t mean that the earlier book is a novel and the later book is a memoir. For only one thing, while the mother is portrayed as a religious fanatic in both works, in Oranges I didn’t think of her as being mentally ill, or a child abuser, as I did while reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Also, in Oranges, I understood why Jeanette had felt so close to her church community and to her mother, something I didn’t get a sense of in the memoir, thus rendering her expulsion more devastating in the former.
Story-sequences, particularly the one of Perceval and the other of a character called Winnet, are interspersed with the narration of Jeanette’s life-events to show storytelling was the means the burgeoning writer used to find her way. Yet I thought this novel was at its best during the “real” story, with the interactions of Jeanette and her mother and the other church members.
After recently reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? and hearing conflicting opinions on whether it was now ‘necessary’ to read the much-earlier Oranges, I decided "why not?"
The beginning of Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? covers the same territory as Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but the two works are quite different, and I don’t mean that the earlier book is a novel and the later book is a memoir. For only one thing, while the mother is portrayed as a religious fanatic in both works, in Oranges I didn’t think of her as being mentally ill, or a child abuser, as I did while reading Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?. Also, in Oranges, I understood why Jeanette had felt so close to her church community and to her mother, something I didn’t get a sense of in the memoir, thus rendering her expulsion more devastating in the former.
Story-sequences, particularly the one of Perceval and the other of a character called Winnet, are interspersed with the narration of Jeanette’s life-events to show storytelling was the means the burgeoning writer used to find her way. Yet I thought this novel was at its best during the “real” story, with the interactions of Jeanette and her mother and the other church members.
August 24, 2021
[2.5] This autobiographical novel is the first book by Winterson that I didn't enjoy. There are moments of marvelous writing, but this strung together collection of anecdotes, fairy tales and revelations left me mostly bored. The parts that I liked seemed to be a repetition of her memoir “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?".
November 10, 2008
You need a lot of patience for Jeanette Winterson's weird little Beowulfesque tangents, but if you can get past that, there are little gems of brilliant clarity scattered throughout.
For me, this bit redeems all the boring parts:
"But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed." (can't remember what page)
For me, this bit redeems all the boring parts:
"But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn't rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and know that love is as strong as death, and be on my side for ever and ever. I want someone who will destroy and be destroyed by me. There are many forms of love and affection, some people can spend their whole lives together without knowing each other's names. Naming is a difficult and time-consuming process; it concerns essences, and it means power. But on the wild nights who can call you home? Only the one who knows your name. Romantic love has been diluted into paperback form and has sold thousands and millions of copies. Somewhere it is still in the original, written on tablets of stone. I would cross seas and suffer sunstroke and give away all I have, but not for a man, because they want to be the destroyer and never the destroyed." (can't remember what page)
December 21, 2010
Oranges are not the only fruit, a book ruined by its author. And well, itself. When I began reading it for the first time, I enjoyed it; Jeanette was a witty character, though a tad hard to relate to, and her life as a girl trying to break free of a small town is a story many of us can understand.
What hurt the book for me was its pretence, emphasised in Winterson’s ludicrously self gratifying introduction. It is difficult, for someone used to the more modest comments of authors such as Woolf (“I have my hopes for this book” – Mrs Dalloway), to understand how someone could be so arrogant and self indulged with themselves, especially after their apparently tragic childhood. This, unfortunately, began to rear its ugly head in the novel, as well.
Jeanette the character is absurd – she lives in the perpetual hypocrisy that no one understands her, yet she refuses to understand the plights of others, for example, Melanie. This simply was not countered, or indeed, addressed as a character flaw. Instead it was held as a beacon. That annoyed me.
However, the novel itself did present an interesting read in many respects. The magic realism used was something I had not come across in my reading, and at first I was impressed at the way it was used to subtly parallel Jeanette’s life. Then it began to play a larger role, and the more I saw of it, the more I disliked its use. I suppose it was ‘the fashion at the time’ the book was written. Now it is less apparent in novels, though can still be used to great avail.
For me a novel that attacks the establishment of the church is always welcome. And one that attacks the prejudice that we still see against homosexuals is something I feel ought to be praised. Unfortunately, so did Winterson.
Three words: hit and miss.
What hurt the book for me was its pretence, emphasised in Winterson’s ludicrously self gratifying introduction. It is difficult, for someone used to the more modest comments of authors such as Woolf (“I have my hopes for this book” – Mrs Dalloway), to understand how someone could be so arrogant and self indulged with themselves, especially after their apparently tragic childhood. This, unfortunately, began to rear its ugly head in the novel, as well.
Jeanette the character is absurd – she lives in the perpetual hypocrisy that no one understands her, yet she refuses to understand the plights of others, for example, Melanie. This simply was not countered, or indeed, addressed as a character flaw. Instead it was held as a beacon. That annoyed me.
However, the novel itself did present an interesting read in many respects. The magic realism used was something I had not come across in my reading, and at first I was impressed at the way it was used to subtly parallel Jeanette’s life. Then it began to play a larger role, and the more I saw of it, the more I disliked its use. I suppose it was ‘the fashion at the time’ the book was written. Now it is less apparent in novels, though can still be used to great avail.
For me a novel that attacks the establishment of the church is always welcome. And one that attacks the prejudice that we still see against homosexuals is something I feel ought to be praised. Unfortunately, so did Winterson.
Three words: hit and miss.
May 31, 2022
This strange and fascinating work of auto-fiction is unlike anything I’ve read before. It’s sharp, funny – in that very dry British way – but also very sad. The cruelty and heartlessness endured by Winterson’s alter ego was crushing to read about; I find stories of bad parenting, especially those involving fanatical religious sentiments, to be especially devastating.
Jeanette is adopted by a fanatically religious mother, and a mostly aloof and absent father. For many years, life amongst her mother’s community of fundamentalists and missionaries is all she knows: when she asks questions, she only gets evasive answers, she suffers from horrible neglect and is never shown any kind of affection by the people who bring her up. It is only once she has to go to school with other children that she realizes that there is something off about her upbringing. Eventually, she falls in love with one of her converts, Melanie, something her congregation strongly opposed and condemns as a sin. But Jeanette can’t accept that the love she feels is wrong…
I am not a fan of religious fundamentalism, and I do take a certain satisfaction in reading any book in which people who take their religion that seriously are described as behaving monstrously – few things strike me as more abhorrent that rejecting a child who simply wants to be themselves because that goes against whatever lunatic nonsense a person has been indoctrinated in. In that regards, I sympathized with and rooted for Jeanette: I wanted her to get out of there and go live life on her own terms, and even if there is a bittersweetness to the conclusion, it was satisfying. However, I am clearly not the only reader who felt like the introduction spoils the book: the pretentiousness that oozes off those few pages gives the rest of the book an after-taste of bitterness that the clever writing and interesting structure can’t quite manage to make up for.
I hesitated between 3 and 4 stars, and finally decided to round it up, because it was better than the other Winterson book I read. That said, I’m not sure I’m interested in reading more of her work.
Jeanette is adopted by a fanatically religious mother, and a mostly aloof and absent father. For many years, life amongst her mother’s community of fundamentalists and missionaries is all she knows: when she asks questions, she only gets evasive answers, she suffers from horrible neglect and is never shown any kind of affection by the people who bring her up. It is only once she has to go to school with other children that she realizes that there is something off about her upbringing. Eventually, she falls in love with one of her converts, Melanie, something her congregation strongly opposed and condemns as a sin. But Jeanette can’t accept that the love she feels is wrong…
I am not a fan of religious fundamentalism, and I do take a certain satisfaction in reading any book in which people who take their religion that seriously are described as behaving monstrously – few things strike me as more abhorrent that rejecting a child who simply wants to be themselves because that goes against whatever lunatic nonsense a person has been indoctrinated in. In that regards, I sympathized with and rooted for Jeanette: I wanted her to get out of there and go live life on her own terms, and even if there is a bittersweetness to the conclusion, it was satisfying. However, I am clearly not the only reader who felt like the introduction spoils the book: the pretentiousness that oozes off those few pages gives the rest of the book an after-taste of bitterness that the clever writing and interesting structure can’t quite manage to make up for.
I hesitated between 3 and 4 stars, and finally decided to round it up, because it was better than the other Winterson book I read. That said, I’m not sure I’m interested in reading more of her work.
July 14, 2019
I picked up Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges are Not the Only Fruit with the expectation that it might be a little salacious. By chapter two I expected something of an expose’ of the Christian far right. By the end I felt I had been carefully drawn into the mind of an independent woman who had learned to be consistent within her self without deliberately visiting drama on her family or community. Not the trip I expected but one I respect. This is a strong recommendation for Oranges. I have only a mild warning for parents who do not want a central topic of this book mentioned. There are no words or graphic acts, just that some parents may wish to over control what subjects are in front of their teens.
For the rest of this review, I will post a spoiler alert.
As a male I was not catered to. There are no males in the book who exist as more than back ground figures. Jeanette has little time for or sympathy with men. No male figure has much impact except for vague, comical or negative.
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a short book. It is simply and efficiently told. The reader is expected to be intelligent and not require too many explanations. I will be seeking more novels by Jeanette Winterson.
For the rest of this review, I will post a spoiler alert.
As a male I was not catered to. There are no males in the book who exist as more than back ground figures. Jeanette has little time for or sympathy with men. No male figure has much impact except for vague, comical or negative.
Oranges are Not the Only Fruit is a short book. It is simply and efficiently told. The reader is expected to be intelligent and not require too many explanations. I will be seeking more novels by Jeanette Winterson.
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