Mercedes Cebrián interviews Jeanette Winterson (video)
Conversation with Bel Olid (video)Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (film)
BIOGRAPHY
Jeanette Winterson was born in Manchester in 1959 and
was adopted by a very religious family.
At 16, she discovered she was a lesbian and left home.
Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,
a semi-autobiographical novel, tells us her experiences of her childhood and
adolescence in this family. (There’s an adaptation of this book for the
television.)
She got a job as an assistant editor for a feminist
publisher.
Besides writing and editing, she refurbished a house
in Spitalfields, and there she opened an organic food shop.
Other books of hers are The Passion, set in the
Napoleonic period, and The Daylight Gate, based on the 1612 witch trials
in Lancashire.
She had a relation with Pat Kavanagh, Julian Barnes’s
wife, but it didn’t last, and Pat went back to her husband.
INTRODUCTION. The Wrong Crib.
This first chapter of Why Be Happy... is a sort
of introduction to the book and presents some questions that are going to
appear along the narrative: her adoption, religion, lesbianism, literature,
feminism, parental and filial love. But sometimes you think it’s a kind of
revenge against her foster parents, especially her foster mother, an
authoritarian person obsessed with the biblical religion.
But all in all, the story is about the research of the
protagonist’s biological parents and her own identity. And also trying to
discover why she was an adopted girl: was she a desired child, was she given in
adoption because her mother didn’t have any money? Because she was very young?
Because was the fruit of a non-consented relation? But it seems there was
another child to be adopted: why was she the chosen one?
She starts telling us she wrote Oranges and
that when Mrs Winterson (her foster mother) finds out she got very angry.
Jeanette now describes her appearance and personality: a tall, big woman with a
paranoic obsession with religion and strict morality. But she has other
peculiarities apart from going to church almost every day: she never sleeps
with her husband, she keeps a pistol in a drawer, she believes in spirits…
And Jeanette herself is a very singular creature: she
can be violent, she deceives her friends, she keeps a part from the rest of
schoolmates, she likes reading…
And in the next chapters she is going to tell us how
she learnt English Literature reading all the books of the library in
alphabetical order, how she bought second hand books, and she had to hide them,
how Mrs Winterson found them and burned them, and thus she decided to write her
own, why she left her home at sixteen, how she earned some money working in a
market, how she lived in a Mini, how she felt in love with a she-schoolmate,
what were the working-class lives like under Margaret Thatcher, what were her
opinions about her, how her Literature teacher took in her house, how she could
go to Oxford to study Literature…
What kind of people were Mr and Mrs Winterson, what
kind of relationship they had, why they didn’t sleep together, what kind of
religion was the Pentecostal church, what kind of books she read…
There are also very interesting remarks about
literature: i.e., people who read King James’s Bible could understand more easily
Shakespeare because they were written in the same 17th century
English.
But the big part of the story is the research and
finally, after a long process and innumerable bureaucratic hurdles, finding out
who her mother was, meeting her and tying to accommodate herself with her new
relatives.
QUESTIONS
-Do you think there’s always something missing in an
adopted child?
-What would you say if a writer used your person as a
character for a novel?
-What is for you to be “normal”?
-What can you tell about the story of Philomel?
-The narrator mention “stammering” when you have had a
kind of trauma. What do you know about the causes of stammering?
-What can you tell us about these films: Secrets and Lies, by Mike Leigh, and Rosemary’s Baby, by Roman Polanski?
VOCABULARY
crib, McCarthyism, flare, Pentecostal, bare-knuckle
fighter, copperplate, be borne up on the shoulders, duffel-coat. Shift, cover
story, flash-dash, terraced house, tick-box, catapult, misfit, forensically,
shot, Philomel, blotted, vale, thug, seances, poodle, larder, cap-gun