Continuing my program of reading lesbian writers' memoirs of their mothers...I've never read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. I've read some other Winterson, attracted by her style more than her subject matter, but that one hasn't yet percolated to the top of the pile. This one, though, had the killer title. And some pretty good reviews.I don't think it's unfair to the book to say that it spends its first half building up the character of "Mrs. Winterson," who adopted Jeanette at 6 weeks old, into someone who could believably ask her daughter the insane titular question. Another quarter goes to Jeanette's escape from home to Oxford, where she was hardly more welcome—and then Winterson skips over the 25 years of her public life as a writer to tell the story of her recent stumbling and shameful discovery of her birth mother.In the end, this book is about exactly the same thing as Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama, without all the psychoanalytic apparatus: When love is unreliable and you are a child, you assume that it is the nature of love – its quality – to be unreliable. Children do not find fault with their parents until later. [p. 76] "Mrs. Winterson was not a welcoming woman" (p. 100), but she had adopted Jeanette from a mother who had seen fit to give her up. Jeanette learns as a child to reconcile this bleak environment with the name "home" and to call this cold, distant person "mother." Even now she cannot detach herself completely: "She was a monster but she was my monster" (p. 229).Her life was home, church, school—and the library. Now: Books, for me, are a home. Books don't make a home – they are one, in the sense that just as you do with a door, you open a book, and you go inside. Inside there is a different kind of time and a different kind of space. [p. 61] Or later: "If poetry was a rope, then the books themselves were rafts" (p. 164). Growing up she could see, thanks to books, that another world was possible; when she made good her escape it wasn't to that world, but to one flawed in other ways, and so books are still necessary. If she can't find the one that takes her where she wants to go, she must write it herself.Rambling episodes and emergent structure are trademarks of Winterson's style, and they're present in this narrative as in her fiction—but here, perhaps because the story is "fact," I got impatient with her wandering and dawdling, even though I knew they were telling me something about the present-day narrator who is, after all, the subject. We know the protagonist survives childhood and becomes a writer; what only she could give us would be the experience of that child's perspective, with no escape visible. On the other hand, if we allow that this memoir is as much about her recent self-discovery, then that should be clarified and foregrounded from the start. Maybe organizing things more cleanly and linearly (even if in two parallel lines) would destroy this book, but I found myself frustrated by the very narrative tics which attract me to Winterson's fiction.Some more brilliant quotes which I couldn't work in to my review:"And I wasn't looking to improve the conditions of my life. I wanted to change my life out of all recognition." (p. 133)"I had been given life and I had done my best with what I had been given. But there was no more to do there." (p. 169)(about reconstructing her lost childhood) "This is the most dangerous work you can do. It is like bomb disposal but you are the bomb." (p. 172)
