Personally, I felt like this connection was not as powerful as it could have been – which, incidentally, sums up my feelings about the book as a whole. However, Winterson also weaves Arthurian legend into the plot, putting her own journey side by side with the trials of the knights. The novel is split up into a number of parts, each named after a Bible book (early childhood is Genesis, and so on). She thinks that she was foolish and weak and made mistakes in her youth, but now she is determined that her daughter will become the shining saint she failed to be. She can be cold and harsh, but there seems to be a passion underneath that she is desperate to suppress. She takes reality and reworks it until she can make sense of it, smoothing out all the uncomfortable rough patches and taking out whatever makes her uncomfortable. Jeanette’s mother is easily the most intriguing character in the book, and it is almost a shame when she has to make room for Jeanette’s coming out plot. I have never since played cards, and I have never since read Jane Eyre. It was like the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards. I found out, that dreadful day in a back corner of the library, that Jane doesn’t marry St John at all, that she goes back to Mr Rochester. Later, literate and curious, I had decided to read it for myself. I couldn’t read it, but I knew where the pages turned. Jane Eyre was her favourite non-Bible book, and she read it to me over and over again, when I was very small. She has even rewritten the plot of Jane Eyre to fit this dream: The first part of the novel is dominated by Jeanette’s mother, a powerful figure who has her heart set on her daughter becoming a missionary. And then she falls in love with another girl. Her mother bears this outsider status as a badge of honour, but young Jeanette sometimes feels frustrated that some people don’t understand her. Because of her upbringing, she has trouble fitting in both at school and in the general community.
It tells the story of a young Jeanette, growing up in a strict religious household in a small English town.
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is one of the quintessential queer coming-of-age novels (well, more like a barely veiled memoir, but okay).
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