In the memoir, Winterson writes that she gave herself a friend-the character of Elsie Norris-because the lonely truth of her own childhood was too much to bear at the time she was writing Oranges. In her 2011 memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?-which Winterson describes as the “silent twin” to Oranges-Winterson, having gained some temporal and emotional distance from the events of her childhood, writes much more starkly and unforgivingly about the physical and psychological abuse she endured at the hands of her mother and the officials at their family’s church. She makes her home in the Cotswolds, just west of Oxford.Īccording to Winterson and her reviewers alike, Oranges contains a greater levity and takes a much vaguer shape than what happened in her actual childhood. She is married to the writer and psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, and teaches at the University of Manchester. She was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 2006.
A prolific writer, Winterson is the author of over twenty-five books of fiction, nonfiction, and literature for children. The novel was an enormous success, winning the prestigious Whitbread Award for a First Novel, and was eventually adapted into a serial television program for the BBC-Winterson wrote the screenplay, and the program premiered in 1990 to even more buzz and acclaim. Shortly after graduating, Winterson published her first book-the autobiographical novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit-in 1985, at just twenty-five years old.
Winterson was raised to be a missionary, but after coming out as a lesbian at the age of sixteen, she was forced to leave home, live in her car, and work odd jobs to put herself through college at Oxford University. Born in Manchester to a seventeen-year-old factory worker and adopted by the Winterson family six months after her birth, Jeanette Winterson was raised by Pentecostal Evangelical Christian parents in Accrington, a manufacturing city in Northern England.
0 kommentar(er)
