Jeanette Winterson on Her Book-Burning Mother

Jeanette Winterson pens a long essay in the Guardian about the emerging lesbian / writer within, and her battles with her adoptive mother who made them go to church six nights a week and burned her secret collection of novels. Upon the publication of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit in 1985, the estranged pair reconnected via two phone booths:

"Mrs Winterson was having none of it. She knew full well that writers were sex-crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work. Books had been pretty much forbidden in our house, and so for me to have written one, and had it published, and had it win a prize … and be standing in a phone box giving her a lecture on literature, a polemic on feminism …

"The pips – more money in the slot – and I'm thinking, as her voice goes in and out like the sea, "Why aren't you proud of me?" The pips – more money in the slot – and I'm locked out and sitting on the doorstep again. It's really cold and I've got a newspaper under my bum and I'm huddled in my duffel coat.

"A woman comes by whom I know. She gives me a bag of chips. She knows what my mother is like...

"We're still on the phone in our phone boxes. She tells me that my success is from the Devil, keeper of the wrong crib. She confronts me with the fact that I have used my own name in the novel – if it is a story, why is the main character called Jeanette?"

Presumably an excerpt from her forthcoming memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, which Grove is publishing next March.