‘Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit’ by Jeanette Winterson

I was leafing through the latest issue of ELLE the other day, the February issue with Scarlett Johansson on the cover, when as usual I lingered over the My Life in Books feature. This is when a notable person, such as a fashion designer or musician, discusses the books that have had an impact on his or her life. This month’s notable person was writer and TV presenter Dawn O'Porter, who had some truly great works on her list. Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit was among them, and after reading through her reasons for choosing it I quickly set about finding out for myself.

Published in 1985 to great critical acclaim, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is the story of a girl who grows up in an English Pentecostal community and ends up falling in love with one of her female converts. The novel, frequently described as a bildungsroman, is said to be a semi-autobiographical account of Winterson’s own experiences growing up in the Elim Pentecostal Church, however several critics have refuted this. But regardless of whether Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is fact or fiction, or a bit of both, it bears much evidence of a great imagination at play. Besides, if I’d had an upbringing as unorthodox as Jeanette Winterson’s I would likely be powerless to prevent it from trickling into my work, however fictional that work may be.

I started reading Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit late Sunday night - very late Sunday night, in fact it was probably more like Monday morning - and come Monday evening I had finished it. For me this is rapid reading and I attribute it entirely to Winterson’s fluent writing style; I am not nor have I ever been a speed reader. Her voice is both original and accessible, and the novel is likewise filled with eerily relatable passages. Here’s one of my favourites: ‘I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had. There’s a chance that I’m not here at all, that all the parts of me, running along the choices I did and didn’t make, for a moment brush against each other.’

Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is undoubtedly a very unique novel, and Jeanette Winterson is an author whose work I will be delving into more often from now on.

This piece was originally published on alisonlaurabell.tumblr.com in January 2013.