Elizabeth Roche Griffin 09 April 2012
Five days after the passing of American poet, Adrienne Rich, I found myself reading Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit. This is a book I have had on my list of must reads for over ten years, but only after recently hearing Winterson on BBC2, My Life in Books (I love living in Britain again simply for programs such as these which would never make the airwaves in the States!), was I truly compelled to read Oranges in earnest. I was mesmerized listening to Winterson on My Life in Books. Her ability to weave stories together - linking the books she had selected with aspects of her personal journey – was genuine, honest, captivating, humorous and humbling. I was compelled to immediately purchase and read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit.
The timing of reading this book was significant for me. Adrienne Rich was a writer who changed my life. Upon first hearing Rich’s Diving Into the Wreck, I literally stopped in my tracks, and knew that I needed to know about this writer and her work. Over time, the more I came to read Rich, the more I fell in love. She wrote with an open heart, and a deeply rich and honest voice. Rich did not write to portray what is known or comfortable but rather, she took on the opposite, continually challenged herself, her readers, as well as the entities of the establishment and society. I began Winterson’s work with underlying feelings of loss for a great writer and role model.
I did not open Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit hoping to find a replacement for Rich. In terms of labels, we are likely to find their writings on the same shelf in your local bookstore, under a label perhaps for “female writers addressing issues of sexuality”, and to not draw some comparisons would be to purposefully overlook the obvious. But one cannot and does not replace the other. I opened Oranges, specifically the Vintage Books 2001 edition, and found not a replacement for Rich, but rather wonderfully and thankfully, a branch of Rich’s legacy living simultaneously as a gorgeous sturdy tree, calm and wise within its own unique grove. I had stumbled into Winterson at exactly the right moment.
Some twenty-five years after first being published, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, stands a book that demands to be read. It is unlike anything else I have ever encountered, a story that is both “comforting” and “threatening”. In simple terms, it is a coming of age story. The heroine, Jeanette must discover who she really is. Jeanette is a trustworthy, honest, and humorous narrator. Her mother’s religious devotion, dictates Jeanette’s life, and the reader is granted full access into this godly world. And within and through this structure, Winterson weaves a story, “that you can read in spirals” one aspect spinning out, down, and in, bumping and interweaving with other spirals along the way. It is Jeanette’s outer world, while unique to many readers, of absolute, unequivocal (religious and social) truths, meeting up with rich, often fantastical, and often frightening inner-world truths.
In her introduction Winterson writes, “Everyone at some time in their life, must choose whether to stay with a ready-made world that may be safe but which is also limiting, or to push forward, often past the frontiers of commonsense, into a personal place, unknown and untried.” I found myself routing for Jeanette, cheering her on her way to discovering the whole of herself, and full of compassion for her unabashed honesty. “The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do not know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met.” It is Winterson’s ability via Jeanette, or Jeanette’s via Winterson, to want to know this need, that lead me to heave a huge sigh of relief. The prose of Adrienne Rich addressed this important question, and many others, time and again. Winterson’s work fully embraces this legacy, and furthers it, reaching back and beyond, to a voice uniquely her own and simultaneously belonging to so many. To discover a rich, complex, and wonderful work like Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and a writer of Winterson’s caliber leaves me filled with hope - and the utmost gratitude. An absolute must read.