Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

— 1985 —

Jeanette Winterson

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New York: Grove Press, 1985; 182 pages

FIRST LINES

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; it didn’t matter what. She was in the white corner and that was that.

PLOT SUMMARY

With eight chapters named for books of the Bible—the Old Testament, significantly—Winterson’s prizewinning first novel is a frequently laugh-out-loud coming-of-age story. It is also a coming-out story.

Told by an adopted girl not coincidentally named Jeanette, it is about her idiosyncratic family, living in a dreary industrial town in the north of England. As a child, Jeanette’s life is dominated by her evangelical mother, who tunes into radio programs plotting the progress of global missionary efforts. There is much churchgoing in a world governed strictly by the mother’s views:

Enemies were:

Friends were:

Interspersed with the fairy tales and Arthurian legends that course through Jeanette’s imagination, her story moves from grade school, where she scares the other children with stories of Hell, to her plan as a teenager to become a missionary. Those plans change when she sees a girl cleaning fish at the market. “She looked up, and I noticed her eyes were a lovely grey, like the cat Next Door.”

The girl from the fish market comes to church. And then comes the sermon on “Unnatural Passions.”

A word on the title: it is attributed to a famed eighteenth-century English actress, Nell Gwyn, who started life in the theater as a scantily clad “orange girl,” selling fruit to theater patrons, and later became a lover to Charles II. Oranges are cited often, given to Jeanette by her mother, especially when she is ill. The orange motif, which has surely inspired entire dissertations, works on several levels, including the notion that “fruit” is slang for “gay.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: JEANETTE WINTERSON

It might be best to tell her story as it appears on Winterson’s website:

I was born in Manchester, England, to a young woman who worked as a machinist at Marks & Spencer. That was in the days when Lancashire was still the textile king of the U.K., and garments for M&S were made in their factory in Manchester. Ann was sixteen or seventeen when she gave birth to me. She came from an Irish family of ten children, and it was decided that adoption was the best thing. For me. For her.

Winterson’s adoptive parents were Pentecostals, and Jeanette was raised to be a missionary.

Once you know Jeanette Winterson’s biography, you will see that details from her life correspond closely with those of the fictional Jeanette in her novel.

In real life, Jeanette Winterson sold ice cream from a van and worked in a funeral parlor—also delightfully part of the fictional Jeanette’s story. Winterson also escaped her mother, the Pentecostal church, and cheerless Accrington. But the real Jeanette goes places her fictional counterpart does not. She studied at Oxford and later worked in a London theater. After interviewing for a job at a newly formed feminist press, she was encouraged by its editor to write the novel that became Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. Published in 1985, the book won the Whitbread Award for best first novel, becoming a word-of-mouth best seller. In 1990—the year her mother died—Winterson adapted the novel for BBC Television.

Two more acclaimed novels, The Passion (1987) and Sexing the Cherry (1989), followed and Winterson was freed to write full-time. In 1994 she bought a property in the Cotswolds, and later she opened an organic food shop called Verde in the Spitalfields neighborhood of East London.

Her fiction from this stretch was thought to be uneven. “During the 90s,” Stuart Jeffries commented in The Guardian, “it became commonplace for critics to argue that Winterson was steadily writing worse novels.” Following the end of a long-term relationship, Winterson revealed in an interview that she had considered suicide, spurred by the discovery of her adoption papers. Winterson revisited her early life and coming out in a memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (2011).

“The memoir’s title is the question Ms. Winterson’s adoptive mother asked after discovering her daughter was a lesbian,” Dwight Garner wrote in a New York Times review. “This sentence carries a large freight of irony because Ms. Winterson, in this book, seems nearly incapable of happiness, and suspicious of it as well.”

In 2009, Jeanette met Susie Orbach, a well-known psychoanalyst and author of Fat Is a Feminist Issue and The Impossibility of Sex. They married in 2015 but have since separated. In 2019, Winterson’s novel Frankissstein, a reimagining of Mary Shelley’s classic Frankenstein, was long-listed for the Booker Prize and in 2021, she published 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next, a collection of essays on the implications of artificial intelligence.

WHY YOU SHOULD READ IT

First, read it for Winterson’s razor-sharp humor. The fictional Jeanette of Oranges is an astute observer of the quirks of an idiosyncratic family. Recalling her mother’s piety, she says:

We had no Wise Men because she didn’t believe there were any wise men. But we had sheep. One of my earliest memories is me sitting on a sheep at Easter while she told me the story of the Sacrificial Lamb. We had it on Sundays with potato.

And yes, read it as a coming-out narrative. Though it may be of particular interest to readers drawn to LGBT literature, “it’s for anyone interested in what happens at the frontiers of common-sense,” Jeanette Winterson once stated on her website. “Do you stay safe or do you follow your heart? I’ve never understood why straight fiction is supposed to be for everyone, but anything with a gay character or that includes gay experience is only for queers. That said, I’m really glad the book has made a difference to so many young women.”

Finally, though, read it as a deeply insightful and sharply etched portrayal of a child becoming a young woman—a bright, perceptive young woman who chafes at a prescribed destiny. With mordant wit and a love of language, Winterson does this poignantly. Her deft use of the fairy tales and legends that fill the young fictional Jeanette’s thoughts adds resonance to the story. She is on a quest and she has beasts and demons to battle. One of those demons is her mother.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

Winterson has written more than twenty books, including nonfiction and children’s books. The two novels that followed Oranges are still considered among her best work. The Passion, named to the BBC’s list of “100 Novels That Shaped Our World,” is about a young soldier in the Napoleonic army; Sexing the Cherry is about a mother and daughter who time-travel from seventeenth-century London in search of exotic fruits. Yes, fruit again. Both books drew comparisons to García Márquez, though Winterson rejects the label of “magical realism” for her work.

Her 2019 novel, Frankissstein, melds an account of Mary Shelley writing her most famous novel with a Brexit-era story about an expert in artificial intelligence and sex toys. Crediting the book “with an intelligent soul,” New York Times critic Dwight Garner wrote, “This novel is talky, smart, anarchic and quite sexy.”

Interviewed at the time the book was published, Winterson said:

The purpose of art changes as society changes. Sometimes art has to break us up—sometimes art has to heal us up. Literature, because it is made of language, returns language to us. If we have the words, we are not silenced, although we learn, through the enforced quiet of reading, what it means to be silent.