When Winnet experiences love and desire for the first time, the sorcerer insists that Winnet has been “spoiled” and casts her out.

Adopted and “named” by the sorcerer, Winnet’s experience mirrors Jeanette’s adoption by her mother as an infant. Likewise, the story of Winnet, who leaves home and seeks refuge in the hut of an evil sorcerer who attempts to claim her forever by guessing her name, comes right after Jeanette’s mother has ordered her to leave home after learning about Jeanette’s second lesbian relationship. This tale mirrors the pressures the young and faithful Jeanette felt to be a flawless and unquestioning member of her church, despite her burgeoning homosexual desires and escalating conflicts with her mother. For example, when Jeanette’s pastor speaks menacingly of perfection and flawlessness during a sermon, the narrative splits from the main action and bounds off into a story about a prince who sought the perfect bride-unable to find her after years of searching and meditating on the nature of perfection, the prince beheads every woman who does not meet his standards of flawlessness. Each time the narrative splits off into these flights of fancy, there is a direct or indirect parallel between what is happening in Jeanette’s “real” life and what is happening in her fantasy world, showing that Jeanette makes sense of her life through stories. Jeanette (the writer and the character) seeks solace from her traumatic childhood in invented tales of fantasy and adventure, which shows the importance of storytelling to everyday life.

As the narrative unfolds, Winterson uses these fantastical tales to impose a narrative on her childhood, imbue it with morals and meaning, and, in doing so, make her horrible experiences into something she could survive. Though most of the novel closely tracks the “realism” of her own childhood, several interludes-fairy tales, parables, and stories of King Arthur’s knights-explore the cruelty of Jeanette’s circumstances through her escapist fantasies of knights, sorcerers, and princesses. In writing an autobiographical novel based heavily on her own experiences growing up as an adopted child in an evangelical household in a small, working-class English town, Jeanette Winterson the author blurs the line between the real and the unreal, the recorded and the invented, to communicate the emotional experience of her childhood. Jeanette Winterson the writer and Jeanette the character are both keenly aware that life can often be stranger than fiction.

Oranges are not the only fruit pages