EDUCATED
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Accrington Girls’ High
School; St Catherine’s
College, Oxford.
LIVES
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Oxfordshire and London.
BOOKS
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Include Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Written on the Body, The Passion, Sexing the Cherry and The PowerBook.
WRITING LIVES
When do you write?
I write for as long as it takes. I don’t limit the day or structure it like that. I simply do what has to be done.
Where do you write?
In a special wooden barn in Oxfordshire or on aeroplanes.
Pen or computer?
Both. It just depends what I feel like. I have an Apple G4 laptop which I take everywhere with me.
Silence or music?
Silence always.
What started you writing?
It was a natural thing to do.
Do you have any writing rituals or superstitions?
The studio is almost empty and obsessively tidy. I hate clutter and I can’t write with clutter around me.
Which living writer do you most admire?
More than one but lists are misleading.
What or who inspires you?
The state of the world and the chance to make a difference in it.
What’s your favourite trashy read?
I don’t really have a reading one but I do listen to The Archers.
Top Ten Books
THESE ARE NOT in any order of preference. I have had to miss out all the plays I love to read, and so many of the poets, but this is a representative choice, and an honest one. In an ideal world I would have added the Bible and the Collected Works of Jung, plus loads of art books by old fogies like Roger Fry, Clive Bell and Kenneth Clark. As it is, my top ten has stretched to eleven, and I haven’t got in any of the exciting thinkers, like Susan Sontag.
Invisible Cities
Italo Calvino
The perfect anti-realism, short-form narrative. An antidote to those big fat documentary novels that pretend to be a slice of life.
Wuthering Heights
Emily Bronte
Wild, driven, uncouth, poetic. This is not Jane Austen’s rigorous admirable style or George Eliot’s magisterial narrative, or Charlotte Bronte’s contained explosions. Wuthering Heights is untamed. True feral energy for the first time in fiction by a woman.
Orlando
Virginia Woolf
What a carve-up! Such a daring thing to do in 1928. Here is the boldness of a fiction masquerading as a biography, a woman masquerading as a man. She smuggles across the borders of propriety the most outrageous contraband – same-sex love, time travel, shape-shifting, a revision of history. All the things we have come to take for granted from modern fiction, including the collapse of genres, begin here. It is Woolf’s finest achievement, as well as her most popular novel.
Finn Family Moomintroll
Tove Jansson
All of the Moomin books have to go in here for their celebration of imagination and the richness of their fantasy. Moominland is a complete world and one that challenges the dreariness of ours. I still read them sitting on the loo in my study. I love them.
The Inferno
Dante
A strong dark poem, as urgent in feel as it was when Dante wrote it six centuries ago. Which of us has not felt ourselves alone in a dark wood? That selva oscura of the soul? The best English translation is the 2002 text by the Belfast poet Ciaran Carson – a really fabulous piece of work, as chewy in the mouth as Dante’s original.
Four Quartets
T.S.Eliot
This poem means so much to me, in what it has to say and in the way that it says it. A great poem is a journey inwards, and when I am bruised with too much of life’s outward show, I come back here, for quiet and for energy, because in art, quiet and energy are found in the same place.
The Thing in the Gap Stone Stile/Dart
Alice Oswald
Alice Oswald is such an exciting new poet. When I first read her, the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. She is the real thing, and that is what we need in a world of makeshift and fake.
Tom Jones
Henry Fielding
Beautiful language, very funny, very sad, and a reminder of the exuberance of eighteenth-century writing – great freedom of expression, and a very different sensibility to the Victorians.
Sons and Lovers
D.H. Lawrence
What a good writer he is. I love his anger, his sensuality, his prose like a powerful animal.
Venice
Jan Morris
Jan Morris has taken travel writing to new continents of thought. I have enjoyed everything she has written but I have a special affection for this book because it fired me to write a book of my own, The Passion (1987), before I had been to Venice myself.
Letters to a Young Poet
Rilke
Read it and re-read it. I keep a copy in a my travel bag.
About the book
Endless Possibilities
By Jeanette Winterson
WHY WRITE A book about a child growing up in a lighthouse?
The answer would have to begin: Why write a book at all?
After I had finished my novel The PowerBook, published in 2000, I had a strong sense of a cycle of work ending. That cycle began with Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in 1985, and felt more like a carpet I was weaving than a series of separate texts. I would cut the thread at the end of a book, only to take up the strands again, continuing a pattern, working new symbols, testing the symmetry, but with a sense of returning to work rather than starting again.
At the same time, I have never believed that writing one book will guarantee that I will write any more. I am a writer; that is how I identify myself, how I explain myself, how I dream myself, but I know that books cannot be forced. I know that the process is mysterious, and that those who try and explain it in practical terms – go on a creative writing course, plan your work, etc. – miss the real point of it all, that it rises from a deep place in the self, which does not yield to entreaty.
You may want to write a book, you may long to write a book, you may even force yourself to write a book, or worse, force a book to be written, but that is not the same thing as letting the book surface. Until it does, whatever you do will be an act of will, and not an act of imagination.
Creativity is not an amalgam of hard work and cleverness, or of hard work and sincerity, or of hard work and sleight of hand. Now that the use of the word ‘creative’ belongs to accountancy and advertising, and is also used as a badge of honour by media people at desk jobs, we forget that creativity is the most elusive of happenings. If it is happening, hard work and long hours are essential; if it is not happening, all we are doing is putting in overtime.
So I wait and I wait. Then I write and I write. Then I throw most of it away and start again.
‘I usually begin a book with a single sentence or a single image. In the case of Lighthousekeeping, it was the opening sentence.’
I do not write sequentially because I do not think sequentially. I think in pictures, I think of bars of text, like bars of music. I think in scenes, like the cinema, or in voices, like the stage. I never think in terms of a beginning, a middle, an end.
I usually begin a book with a single sentence or a single image.
In the case of Lighthousekeeping, it was the opening sentence, ‘My mother called me Silver. I was born part precious metal, part pirate.’
I knew that a whole character was packed in that sentence, and I set out to unpack her, and to see what would happen.
Some way through the book I sat down to work one morning, and simply typed in, ‘He was walking his dog along the cliff path…’ I stopped. What man? What dog? I realised that a new voice had broken through, and this turned out to be Babel Dark, the nineteenth-century clergyman struggling with demons of his ow
n.
Of course there must be a strong critical and editorial process at work when you are writing – the thing is not an exercise in dictation from the Unconscious, but it is a delicate balance between unruly and unedited thoughts and feelings, and the necessary toughness to cut and discard and revise.
Only at the very end do I number the pages.
‘Lighthousekeeping is a story about telling stories. A story about what stories are, and how they affect us.’
Lighthousekeeping is a story about telling stories. A story about what stories are, and how they affect us. Pew calls them ‘markers, guides, comfort, and warning’.
I believe that. I believe that storytelling is a way of navigating our lives, and that to read ourselves as fiction is much more liberating than to read ourselves as fact. Facts are partial. Fiction is a more complete truth. If we read ourselves as narrative, we can change the story that we are. If we read ourselves as literal and fixed, we find we can change nothing. Someone will always tell the story of our lives – it had better be ourselves.
I wanted to pile stories on top of stories, like bedcovers for a cold night. At the same time, I wanted to break the obvious narrative, and not get bogged down in too much straight-line chronology. I wanted the reader to swing between one story and another, across time, and across character. Fiction is a leap of faith.
Leaping takes energy, from the reader and from the writer, and we are living in a time when fiction is becoming more like a guided tour, a documentary, as close to ‘real life’ as possible, a mimic, a recording angel.
I am unsure that this is the best use of fiction.
Picasso was excited when photography began its serious work in the early twentieth century, because he thought it would finally free up painting from the burden of representation. I hoped that the narrative naturalism of film, and television in particular, would free up the novel from its dreary burden of ‘life as it is lived’, and allow it the talismanic and imaginative possibilities of poetry, where language, and ambition for the form itself, would be more important, more interesting, than everyday narrative.
‘I believe that storytelling is a way of navigating our lives, and that to read ourselves as fiction is much more liberating than to read ourselves as fact.’
Of course, all writers defend the kind of books they themselves write. I set out from the beginning to merge the exactness of poetic language with the stretchiness of storytelling. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don’t. As Sam Beckett advised, ‘Fail, fail again, fail better.’
I love words and my aim is to use them precisely, so that they become an equivalent to the feeling. So that the feeling can be spoken. All art is about emotion.
Lighthousekeeping.
The final section opens with the line ‘Part broken, part whole, you begin again.’
It is a story, it is a net of stories, about beginnings. The hero, Silver, who I won’t call a heroine because that word has a different loading, and no mythic status, must begin her life many times over. It is those moments of beginning, rather than their consequences, that she chooses to tell.
Our mental processes are more like a maze than a motorway. We do not remember our lives chronologically, nor do we reflect on them in neat order. We roam the labyrinths of our experiences, sometimes trying to find the way out, sometimes trying to find the centre, always a little bit lost unless some unexpected insight shows us the way.
Such insights are by their nature imaginative, poetic, heightened, revelatory. They are not the everyday accumulation of data.
‘We do not remember our lives chronologically, nor do we reflect on them in neat order. We roam the labyrinths of our experiences.’
Lighthousekeeping is about those moments – whether or not we act on them. The stories here are those moments that stop the clock as time ticks on. The moments we remember in our lives dedicated to forgetting.
Lighthousekeeping is a sea story, a love story, a loss story, a lost story, a life story, a bedtime story and my story.
That is, it is the only story I could tell at the time I wrote it. I might have preferred to write another story, but I could not do so.
I am not Silver and Silver is not I, but I am not separate from my work either – how could I be, when the stories are spun out of me spider-style?
They come from the centre, and while questions of autobiography are misleading and unhelpful, questions of authenticity are not. We cannot demand that writers write particular kinds of books (though that is what the marketplace and reviewers often do), and we cannot demand that writers write in the way we might prefer them to do (laments about the State of Fiction, blah blah). All we can ask is that the work should be authentic; that is, it should be true to the writer, true to language, true to the necessary development of the form, and true to itself.
Those are the kind of books I want to read, and so those are the kind of books I want to write.
That said, the possibilities are endless.
Read On
Have You Read?
Other novels by Jeanette Winterson
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
This is the story of Jeanette, adopted by working-class evangelists in the North of England in the sixties. Brought up to preach the gospel alongside such spiritual giants as Testifying Elsie and Pastor Spratt, Jeanette is destined for the missionary field, but her high success rate of converts turns into a charismatic encounter with one girl in particular. Love and sex were not scheduled into her timetable, but at sixteen Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family for the young woman she loves. Funny and tender, Oranges is a document of the wilder side of religious enthusiasm, and an exploration of the power of love.
Boating for Beginners
‘Do you understand the meaning of life?’ asked Gloria. She knew that everyone sought this mysterious meaning because it was in all the magazines. Every month there was an article on how to be fulfilled and what to invest in when you were…
Boating for Beginners is the story of Noah and the Flood and a romantic novelist called Bunny Mix – the rabbit of romance. It’s full of silly things and great fun.
The Passion
This is the story of Henri, a young Frenchman sent to fight in the Napoleonic wars. It is the story of Villanelle, a cross-dressing Venetian woman, born with webbed feet. There are four sections: The Emperor, The Queen of Spades, The Zero Winter, The Rock. Told in the first person, The Emperor is Henri’s narrative, while The Queen of Spades belongs to Villanelle. The pair meet in Russia in The Zero Winter. From then the narratives switch and intertwine. The Passion is about war, and the private acts that stand against war. It is about survival and broken-heartedness, and cruelty and madness.
Sexing the Cherry
This is the story of Jordan, an orphan found floating on the River Thames, and his keeper, the Dog Woman, a huge and monstrous creature with a powerful right hook and a wide vocabulary. She is perhaps the only woman in English fiction confident enough to use filth as a fashion accessory. The central relationship between Jordan and the Dog Woman is a savage love, an unorthodox love; it is family life carried to the grotesque, but it is not a parody or a negative. The boisterous surrealism of their bond is in the writing itself. Sexing the Cherry is a cross-time novel in the same way that The Passion is cross-gender. The narrative moves through time, but also operates outside it.
Written on the Body
A simple story: love found, love lost, love found again – maybe. The unnamed narrator falls for a married woman called Louise. Louise leaves her husband but when she finds she has cancer she leaves her new lover too. Written on the Body is a journey of self-discovery made through the metaphors of desire and disease.
The PowerBook
An e-writer called Ali, or Alix (because x marks the spot), will pin up a story for you, cut it to fit. She is a language costumier, writing to order, letting you be the hero of your own life, offering you freedom just for one night. The price? Risk. You risk e
ntering the story as yourself and leaving it as someone else. But if the narrative changes, then so does the narrator, as Ali discovers this is a price she too will have to pay.
Find Out More
READ…
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To the Lighthouse; The Waves
Virginia Woolf
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Life of Pi
Yann Martel
The Odyssey
Homer
The Passion of New Eve