HAIR AND MAKE-UP BY IAN M
CINTOSH
There’s always electricity in the air when
you’re talking to Jeanette Winterson – and
this time confetti too. When we meet at
her agent’s office in London, Winterson’s trademark halo of wild
brown hair is infiltrated with the stuf f, thanks to an earlier celebra-
tion of the publication of her 11th novel, Frankissstein. Hugging me in
greeting, she runs her hands vigorously across her head and a scat-
tering of sparkle drifts down her neat polo shirt and across the floor.
‘Ridiculous!’ she cries, her voice still rich with the ring of her
Accrington childhood. ‘Completely ridiculous!’ And yet I think she
must be a little pleased by the festivities, and by the many – thor-
oughly deserved – accolades she continues to earn.
Winterson burst onto the literary scene in 1985 with the publica-
tion of her first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a fictionalised
version of her extraordinary – and difficult – childhood. Adopted
into a Pentecostal home, the Jeanette of the story, just like the one
who sits in front of me now, was raised to be a preacher by her fear-
some mother. The realisation that she was gay put a spanner in the
evangelical works, and Winterson began to forge her own remark-
able career, following up the success of her debut with The Passion in
1987 – a book that confirmed her as a truly unique storyteller. While
drawing deeply on the literary history she knows so well – you can
see the influence of writers such as Woolf, Borges, Calvino and
Shakespeare in her work – she has always been her own woman,
and in the vanguard of culture. Written on the Body, published in
1992, conceals the gender of its narrator in a manner that presages
today’s increasingly non-binary norms; The PowerBook, published at
the turn of the century, anticipates the ubiquity of the internet; and
this year’s Frankissstein (a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s classic
novel), with its transgender narrator and fascination with artificial
intelligence, is absolutely of the moment.
Having been made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in
2016, Winterson was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday
Honours last year. One might argue that her radical voice is being
co-opted by the establishment – or, as I do, that the world is simply
catching up with her. Does she feel that may be the case? ‘Well,
maybe I do!’ she says, laughing. ‘It’s been a long time coming. I think,
starting as I did in the mid-Eighties, it was a very different world, andI don’t think back then my politics or my
feminism were robust enough to under-
stand that this wasn’t just about me. I’m a
child of Margaret Thatcher, and her great
dictum was “There’s no such thing as
society, there are only individuals”. But
that is so wrong.’ In her early days, Win-
terson’s battle to be heard sometimes
made her a challenging presence, or at
least that’s how she was portrayed in the
press. She understands better now, she
says, that she was not struggling alone.
‘Many women who came before me helped me; enough women
have had enough struggle, and I still believe that we help each other,
even though we don’t always know it. Somebody else before you
does some heavy lifting you don’t have to do, and then you have to
do it further down the line.’
One of the women who has helped Winterson is her wife, the
author and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, whom she married in 2015.
She gives Orbach enormous credit when discussing the writing of
her 2011 memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The
book, whose title is taken from the question her adoptive mother
asked the young Winterson in a confrontation about her sexuality,
charts her search for her birth mother and the breakdown she had
after the end of her relationship with the theatre director Deborah
Warner. To some extent, it retraces the ground covered in Oranges,
but the portrait she paints of her childhood in the memoir is far
bleaker. Her first novel was, she writes, a ‘cover version’; a story
she could live with at the time. Rewriting that narrative in a way
that was even more honest required a deep dive into the past.
‘I couldn’t have done that without Susie,’ she says.
And as for that sense of electricity... when I ask her what Mrs
Winterson would make of her now, the lights in the room unexpect-
edly blink off. We both sit in silence for a moment and then
Winterson’s laughter bursts forth once again. ‘She’s saying, for
heaven’s sake, shut up!’ she hoots, and gestures up to the ceiling.
‘Thanks a lot, Mum.’ We shift a little in our chairs, and as the
lights come back on, I ask her what she plans to do next. ‘How do
we challenge ourselves all the time? ’ she muses. ‘Maybe the me that
I am should change now. And that’s what I want to keep doing
with the work. When I really can’t, I’ll just stay outdoors, because
I’m a good gardener, and I can concentrate on that.’
W h a t ’s c e r t a i n i s t h a t Je a ne t te Wi nte r s on w i l l a lway s b e c a p a ble
of evolution; conjuring up new lands, new bodies, new selves, is
second nature to her. ‘The idea that you can shift yourself from
one shape, one space, one place to another – I love those stories,’
she says. ‘I imagine I could be an eagle – and suddenly maybe I can.’JEANETTE
WINTERSON
WRITER OF THE YEARA born storyteller with
an astonishing gift forprescience as well as literary
radicalism, the author hascreated another dazzling
tour de force with herlatest novel, Frankissstein.
By Erica Wagner