Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth

The Age

12-05-2025

When Jeanette Winterson was 23, she had an interview at the new feminist publisher, Pandora Press, hoping to be their publicist. She didn't get the job. But the way she talked about her extremely strange childhood impressed the publisher, Philippa Brewster, who told Winterson, 'If you can write it the way you tell it, I'll buy it.'
Winterson had always written: sermons, stories to herself to try to make sense of the world. She hadn't tried to write a novel. 'I thought, I'll sit down and see what happens,' she says. 'I had no idea about gender, sexism, all of that.' But although she came from a family where non-religious books were banned, her mother had read to her daily from the King James Bible, which gave her a love of language, story and structure.
What emerged was the fictionalised story of growing up in working-class Accrington, Lancashire, as the adopted child of an eccentric and fiercely Pentecostal evangelist mother. 'I thought I could write my way out,' she says. 'Language is something I can trust, so I can see the inside of my head. You need to be able to write yourself as a fiction, to understand you're a story in progress. I didn't need to be trapped in a narrative that belonged to somebody else.'
The story was funny, awfully bizarre and bizarrely awful – what other child would have her deafness ignored because it was thought she was in a state of rapture? – but to the child Jeanette, it was just life, getting on with things while waiting for Jesus to come and roll up heaven like a scroll. Until at 16 she fell in love with a girl, and everything came apart.
When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better.
After a few months of writing, she cycled back to Pandora with the only copy of her manuscript in her saddlebag (she couldn't afford to photocopy it). This time Pandora's other boss, Australian feminist Dale Spender, was in the office with Brewster. 'Dale snatched the manuscript and read the beginning. Like most people, I lived for a long time with my mother and father. My father liked to watch the wrestling, my mother liked to wrestle. She turned to Philippa and said, 'This is good.' I thought, Oh, there's a way in for me.'
That manuscript became the hugely successful novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, published in 1985. The current publishers, Vintage Classics, are sending their star author around the world to celebrate the book's 40th anniversary. I read it in one breathless swoop, and like many fans, I can't believe it's been 40 years since. Nor can Winterson.
She is talking to me from her home in the Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. Behind her are windows with a view of the woods and the sun is casting a halo over her curly head. An eager and fervent speaker, she still has her Northern accent. 'I was brought up in a gospel tent, I'm never nervous public speaking,' she says. 'They book me in for a lot of big events. The more people the better. I'm trying to present to people what I believe, that's part of my job.'
She's keen to find the positives in even the worst things that have happened to her, and she's hopeful for the future where other writers are gloomy, particularly over her pet subject, the challenges we face with AI.
In the early days, Oranges was sometimes slotted into the cookery bookshelves with the marmalade recipes. Later, it made its way onto the LGBTQ shelves. Now it's in with the literary classics and has found new generations of readers around the world.
Winterson has since written 10 novels, as well as children's books, nonfiction and screenplays, including one for the prizewinning BBC TV adaptation of Oranges. She has won many awards, including a CBE and an OBE for services to literature, and her work is published in 28 countries.
Young people respond to Orange' s queer coming of age story in China and Hungary. 'It's a classic, I'm not the kind of person they would want to ban. At this point in my life I have some useful status, I can get to places other people can't. I'm hoping because it's so well known and well-loved, it will be a kind of raft you can cling onto.'
There wasn't much for young Jeanette to cling to when she fell in love. Mrs Winterson and her fellow church members held an exorcism, chanting continuous prayers, speaking in tongues and laying their hands on Jeanette. It had a hypnotic effect, she says. 'They do believe people are inhabited by devils and they can be expelled. But obviously to a young girl it was frightening.'
Inevitably, teenage Jeanette had to leave home. She moved around for a couple of years, studying and working, living in a tent and sleeping on other people's floors. 'I thought, I can't pretend to be the person they want me to be. By then, things had broken down and were so full of distress and sadness that to stay would have been far worse.'
One of her best times was living in a Mini, with its boot full of her favourite books. 'It wasn't as dramatic as it would be now. I felt free, I wasn't afraid. When you're a young person and you don't have anything, you believe it can only get better.'
She eventually made her way to Oxford University to study English literature. 'It was wonderful, I was free to study. It was also a huge cultural shock because people like me were not there in any numbers. I didn't fit. But it changed my life completely; I was able to move into a different world.'
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Winterson returned to her early years in 2012, this time in a memoir with the title from one of her mother's inspired sayings, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? She had come through a painful period after an attempted suicide and felt she needed to go back. With more distance between her and her childhood, she felt free to mention darker things. 'There's a lot more pain and hurt in that book. I could go back to some of the material and not have to disguise it.'
One of Mrs Winterson's sayings was 'The devil had led me to the wrong crib'. Still, Winterson can see the bright side: 'It's absolutely appalling, but full of metaphor and colour. Suddenly we're not in a crummy two-up and two-down. We're in a fairy tale, an opera, a grand landscape where the devil will bother to come and deceive Mrs Winterson.'
In the memoir, she details her quest to find her birth mother. She succeeded, but it turned out to be a mixed blessing. 'I was glad I found her. I wanted other adopted people to understand if they take that route, they shouldn't imagine there is going to be a pink focus, happy Hollywood ending. We're all going to do our best, but it's fine for it to go wrong.'
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Winterson did have a reunion with her adoptive father before he died. 'I was angry with him for a long time for not standing up for me, and for beating me. I was glad I could meet him on his own terms, there was no point in going in for explanation. Dad was like a very little boy. I thought he was never really allowed to grow up.'
Mrs Winterson died when her daughter was 30, so there was never time for a reunion. In any case, she thinks it would have been impossible. 'She was an absolutist. For her to recognise what happened to me would have reversed everything she believed. She was a deeply unhappy woman, and unhappiness closes you down.'
When Winterson wrote Oranges, 'in my innocence I didn't realise that women were only ever supposed to write about their own experience in a small way. But I don't care. If people are still reading it, if it can still be in print 40 years later, all over the world, I have got something right.'