Oranges are Not the Only Fruit

“This is the novelised version of her life that she wrote when she was much younger. Then she wrote the real version as a normal memoir years later, and called it, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? The fact that Jeanette Winterson’s mother threw her out of the house because she was a lesbian, and said terrible things to her like, ‘I adopted the wrong baby, I adopted a bad baby’ – is just a really shockingly cruel way of behaving. But Jeanette Winterson overcame it. Maybe she got, from her mother, some of her strength. Her mother was clearly a very strong person, so she’s got this ambivalence about her.” Read more...

Five Memoirs by Women

Dorothy Byrne, Journalist