Latest news with #JeanetteWinterson
ABC News
19 hours ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Lucy Dacus answers your questions about life, love and the papal conclave
You might know Lucy Dacus as one-third of Boygenius (alongside Julien Baker and Phoebe Bridgers) or the writer of one of the most devastating songs of 2018 (it's 'Night Shift', obviously). She's also a well-established artist in her own right, and dropped her fourth album in March. To celebrate the release of Forever Is A Feeling and for a cheeky catch up, Lucy joined Abby and Tyrone on Drive and answered some of your burning questions. Who was your niche childhood celebrity crush? - Annabelle I've said this before – it's the poet dog from the Goofy Movie , but I feel like I should pick somebody else. I said this recently but all the Bond girls. I would watch all the James Bond movies and, um, that was important. I kinda had a crush on the goth chick from Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants . She was just so blasé. The way that kids pick their Disney princess, I feel like I had a friend group and we would pick who we were in that book or movie and I was definitely her. What books or films inspired this album? - Ruby There's a book called Written On The Body by Jeanette Winterson. It's narrated by someone whose gender is never disclosed, and they have this passionate, obsession type love for this person. And the way that they write about how they think about the person and what it's like to be in the same room as them and to slip into love with them is... just electric. So I get some inspiration from that. Garth Greenwell is a great writer, he actually wrote my bio for this [album]. He has a book called Cleanness and a book called What Belongs To You that are very sexy and kind of visceral and still really deep and emotional. Just about at what point do we reach into each others' hearts – if you're already physically engaged, at what do you become emotionally engaged? What would your advice be for someone going through a lesbian break-up? - Z I don't know if there's any blanket advice, every situation is so different. Because, I don't know, I could be like 'well, you're better off', or it could be like 'you know, things change'. Here's maybe the piece of advice I give, and this is not just lesbian, this is just for people in general: Ideally relationships are places where we can meet each other where we're at and show each other more of ourselves. And at a certain point, maybe you outpace each other and you have to diverge. Ideally it can be done painlessly, but almost never is that the case. So if you're feeling pain, you don't have to shy away from it. That's just a part of life. I want to write music but it always feels like I'm performing or trying to put on someone I'm not. How do I be more authentic? - Amy Well, the good thing is anything you make is authentic to you, whether it's a performance or not. No one is actually faking it. Some people have an identity they assume. Some people really write from the heart. Some people you feel as disingenuous, other people you feel really genuine, whether or not it's a fictional character that they're within. There's really no wrong entry point. So if you have an easier time writing from another perspective... secretly, you're still just in it. I don't think you actually have to try that hard and I don't know if you're really off-base. I haven't heard your music, but that's what I would say. Can you tour in like a year so I can get my finances together? - Adele I literally wish I could speak to that. I'm very eager to get over there – and my whole band and crew – we have a real soft spot and excitement at the idea of going to Australia. So know that my heart's in the right place. Do you think you would have won if you were competing in the recent papal conclave? - @gorgeousfart I'm not Catholic! Well, but I guess they're getting anybody in there now, it sounds like. So maybe I would have had more of a chance.
Sydney Morning Herald
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sydney Morning Herald
Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth
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.' Loading 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.' Loading 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.'
The Age
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Age
Forty years on, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit still tells a radical truth
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.' Loading 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.' Loading 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.'
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
For great stories, we need people, not AI
Jeanette Winterson asserts that 'humans will always want to read what other humans have to say' (OpenAI's metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving, 12 March). But she neglects the fact that every piece of writing, film‑making or art created by artificial intelligence and then consumed by humans is one less piece of writing, film-making or art created by a human being that will have the chance to be read and enjoyed by humans. One can only wonder if Winterson would hold the same view were she now at the start of her career, rather than having 40 years of success behind her. We are already seeing creative jobs like editing and graphic design being outsourced to AI in dozens of industries. Is Winterson really so naive to think that the same won't happen in literature if AI writing continues to be championed by influential people like her and published prominently in outlets like the Guardian? My question and challenge to the editor is simply this: when was the last time a short story written by a human being was published on your website in a position of such prominence? You have given a story written by AI a huge audience. Why not now do the same for an aspiring, young, human writer? Henry Futcher Norwich It was refreshing to read Jeanette Winterson's article about the creative potential of artificial intelligence. All literature expresses memory and is synthetic, drawing consciously or unconsciously upon human experience, culture and other literature. Neuroscience has shown that humans don't 'experience' experience as simply being present 'in the moment' – it's filtered by consciousness of earlier experience, expectation, memory and social context. So, even the 'I' in lyric poetry may be read as the most unreliable form of intimacy – their 'feelings' may move us, while being as 'inauthentic' and 'trained' as an algorithm. Literature asks an intriguing and elusive question: 'What would it be like to be someone else?' How fascinating to have that question posited by a machine. AI may only be as 'other' as we are to each other. Its creative processes and outputs will surely help to illuminate our MortEmeritus professor of creative writing, Lancaster University As a writer of fiction, I read with interest, and unease, the opinions of authors I admire on the creative writing skills of ChatGPT (A computer's joke, on us': writers respond to the short story written by AI, 14 March). In my day job supporting neurodivergent students with academic skills, I suggest the use of AI as assistive technology – rather than generative, to actually write their essays. Recently, a student told me that he uses the 'AI detector' GPTZero to ensure his written work does not register as AI-generated. I then tested this with a sample of my own work – the first paragraph of a novel. To my horror, it asserted that it was 'moderately confident' that the text was '85% written by AI'. What if agents and publishers use this tool and fail to question its 'judgment'? Can I reassure myself that GPTZero assessed my work as it did because the paragraph was well written? Was this a result of the fact that, after years of extensive reading, I am my own large language model, at least in the realm of fiction? Times are hard enough as a writer without being plunged into an existential crisis of this sort, so I am clinging to that last idea as the most Walters-DaviesAberystwyth, Ceredigion Have an opinion on anything you've read in the Guardian today? Please email us your letter and it will be considered for publication in our letters section.
The Guardian
15-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
OpenAI's story about grief nearly had me in tears, but for all the wrong reasons
Like all parents who pretend to be impressed by their children's terrible art, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proudly announced to the world that the company's new AI model is gifted at creative writing. 'This is the first time I have been really struck by something written by AI,' he enthused on X. The prompt was to write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief. The story closely follows the instructions. The individual sentences mostly make sense. But – with the greatest respect to Jeanette Winterson, who called the story 'beautiful and moving' – it is an atrocious piece of writing. The AI captures the tone of some of the worst writing around: pompous and self-satisfied, while using sentimental imagery ('a girl in a green sweater who leaves home with a cat in a cardboard box') and dull similes ('like a stone dropped into a well'). There is repetition without development, poor structure, an over-reliance on jargon and, crucially, a lack of that slight breath of madness that makes writing human. If this were a first-year creative writing student, you'd give them feedback to help them improve, but you probably wouldn't discourage them from pursuing other job prospects. It is in the gaps between what the author has written and what the reader imagines that writing comes to life. Readers will project meaning on to words on a page, but if those gaps are created by algorithms and chance, the act of creation on the reader's part becomes onanistic; the death of the author requires the author to have been alive at one stage. I asked another AI model to critically evaluate the story, and it found it 'compelling' and 'self-aware', employing 'evocative language and imagery'. Perhaps it was not written for human eyes at all. Sign up to Observed Analysis and opinion on the week's news and culture brought to you by the best Observer writers after newsletter promotion In the furore surrounding the Labour party's devastating welfare cuts – which are estimated to plunge 700,000 households into poverty and have led to widespread rebellion among MPs – we are at risk of overlooking a short video recently released by the Department for Work and Pensions, which exhorts disabled people to get back into the workforce. 'The welfare system we inherited is broken,' a voice intones grimly over footage of a man and a woman entering a job centre. Unfortunately, the building's even red bricks and cast iron archway carry a very specific historical connotation: the gates of Auschwitz, which bear the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei, or 'work sets you free'. During the Holocaust, an estimated 250,000 people with mental and physical disabilities were murdered, as they did not comply with the regime's vision of a master race and were considered a burden to society. The similarity in the video was unintentional. But the fact no one in the department seemed to notice the resemblance is deeply worrying. Congratulations to Whitetop, a sprightly 27-year-old who has been named by the Guinness World Records as the oldest llama in captivity (the previous record holder, Albuquerque ranch resident Dalai Llama, passed away in 2023). For nearly two decades, Whitetop has been providing comfort and support to chronically ill children at a camp in North Carolina. 'He's just a really cool dude and loves his job,' says Billie Jo Davis, the camp's barn director. Let's hope Whitetop has a long and healthy reign. Though perhaps, following the sad fate of Geronimo – the alpaca euthanised in 2021 which may or may not have had bovine TB – it might be a while before Keir Starmer is invited to visit. Kathryn Bromwich is a commissioning editor and writer on the Observer New Review
