Interview: Jeanette Winterson, writer

Jeanette Winterson has asked to meet me in Oxford. The venue is St Catherine’s, the university’s youngest college. It’s a peaceful place in the east of the city, all glass and grass, concrete and water, at once harmonious and contradictory, old and new.

All very fitting for an encounter with the ever irreconcilable Winterson, a writer whose first novel, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, was and wasn’t, about her own childhood, and whose memoir, arriving 26 years later, is in some ways just as fabulously confounding.

Designed by Danish modernist Arne Jacobsen, the college opened in 1962 and his influence remains everywhere in the calm geometry of the quadrangles and the door handles that Winterson invites me to stroke when I leave, saying with a smile: “I used to love these.” Everything in the master’s lodge, which we’ve borrowed for the occasion, is listed so nothing can be changed, which makes it feel like you’re entering a time warp. Or re-entering the past.

Oxford is where Winterson came after she got out. It’s what happened, if you like, after the last page of Oranges. Getting herself here was an audacious move. As she says in her memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, “I decided to apply to read English at the University of Oxford because it was the most impossible thing I could do.”

Winterson knew no-one who had been to university. She was a working class girl from Accrington, a mill town in Lancashire, adopted as a baby by an evangelical Penetecostal couple. She had left home at 16 and had since been sleeping in her Mini or at a teacher’s house. Her mother, who kept a gun in the duster drawer and the bullets in a tin of Pledge in preparation for the Apocalypse, had discovered she was in love with a girl. It was as her daughter prepared to walk out of the door forever that she said “why be happy when you could be normal?”

When Winterson arrived here in the late Seventies (she failed the interview then pitched up again insisting they offer her a place, which they did) she felt like “Jude the Obscure in Thomas Hardy’s novel, and I was determined not to hang myself”. How about now?

“It’s strange. I haven’t been in this room for 30 years. But time is never linear. You always feel that everything happened just yesterday but also 100 years ago. I don’t want to experience time in a line. That’s why I felt completely comfortable in Why Be Happy… with missing out 25 years.”

Ah, yes. The 25 years. Her memoir, as idiosyncratic as all her books, has a hole in the middle like a doughnut. There is the frightening, sad, lonely and plucky childhood living under the “flamboyant depressive” Mrs Winterson (and “poor Dad” as he’s usually called). There is the escape to the “energetic quiet” of Oxford. Then she skips 25 years. When we catch up with Winterson again it’s 2008, she’s just found her adoption paper, and she’s going mad (her words, not mine).

“Once you’ve made that decision you have to stick to it,” she says. “The story is about the presence of one mother and the absence of the other. And it’s my complete inability to do anything in order. I’m like a cat. They can’t walk in a straight line, and neither can I.”

People often compare Winterson to an animal. Sometimes she is a terrier, sometimes a woodland creature. The idea is that she’s small, fierce, fast, and strong. Then there’s the way she looks. The gravity-defying hair, which she likes to run her hands through, encouraging it to shoot upwards. The bright eyes, bookended with crow’s feet. It’s a lively, cheeky face, the face of someone whose sense of humour has survived. Today, in a black shirt, black skinny jeans, Converse, and lime-green socks, she looks much younger than her 52 years.

The books tend to go their own way too, and whether for adults or, more recently, children, are rich in story and ideas, love and death. She is intense on the page and in person, pouncing between subjects like a cat with a ball of yarn. She is famously charismatic, and not just because of the well-documented love affairs with Pat Kavanagh, the late wife of Julian Barnes and, most recently, the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach. Even the photographer (female) texts me afterwards, calling her “a breath of fresh air”. In a recent interview, the journalist (male) mused over whether it was too late to “turn” her. (She also told him her birth mother is dead, interestingly, which is not true and hints at her sense of theatre, play and danger.) A lot of what’s been said about Winterson (that she lives amongst a court of admiring handmaidens, for example) is ridiculous and can be blamed on the stereotype of the predatory lesbian. But no doubt about it, she has more charisma than a Pentecostal preacher.

She is attractive partly because she refuses to be a victim. This is what Winterson tells me about living in her Mini. “I never thought that was a problem, not once I got the order of what to do in the front and the back. It’s about control, isn’t it? If you go around thinking ‘I’m homeless, this is terrible’, then you are and it is. If you think, ‘This is my Mini and I read and eat in the front and sleep in the back’, then you have a life.”

“It’s a good job I’m small,” she notes. “If I was 6ft 4in my life might have been very different.” And she laughs. I tell her I was impressed by her discovery at school that wetting a dog biscuit and dipping it in icing sugar makes it taste like a regular biscuit. “Have you tried it?” she asks me. No. “That’s so wussy of you. Go and get a Bonio. Actually they’re probably awful now, full of additives …”

The latter part of Winterson’s memoir is taken up with the search for her birth mother (alive and well and living in Manchester), and her own battle with madness that culminated in a suicide attempt. But there is more laughter than you might expect during our long, serious conversation. I expected Winterson to be tricky and possibly a bit bonkers. She is, in fact, great company: warm, candid, and interested in the bigger picture. She has unfairly been accused of arrogance, mostly because she once doorstepped a journalist who wrote a bad review and because in 1995, amidst a decade when she fell out of literary favour, she was asked to name her favourite living writer and chose herself, which I think is pretty funny.

We talk a lot about Mrs Winterson. “She was very negative and that was the difference between us,” she says. “For her, life really was a cosmic dustbin with the lid on and nobody was getting out. But I have become more compassionate towards her in a way that is unexpected. I try and look at her in the context of her world. In the beginning she was just this sole figure, this monster, this tower, this creature. It was just me and her. But away from that I see her as part of the war generation and as a clever working class woman with no opportunities. It helps to see yourself as part of history rather than just sitting here with your own stuff.”

Why Be Happy… is a much sadder book than Oranges. Reading them together, you notice the invented bits in Oranges are often the happy bits, like her friend Elsie who didn’t exist. She calls Oranges a cover version: she needed it to write her way out of the past, or write over it. “I suppose that the saddest thing for me,” she writes, “is that I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”

Is Why Be Happy… the other one? Not exactly. “This is just another version,” she insists. “It’s a true story that’s a version. Who knows how I’ll see it in another 25 years.”

In this version the young Jeanette is constantly told that “the Devil led us to the wrong crib”. She is forced to sleep in the coal hole, or locked out overnight on the doorstep, defiantly guzzling the milk delivered in the morning. When Mrs Winterson discovers she has fallen in love with a girl, a terrifying and abusive exorcism is performed by the church elders (this is also in Oranges, but the “true” version is much worse). And all the time, she is trying to read books. When Mrs Winterson finds them under her slowly ascending mattress, she burns them. Winterson picks up the scraps and memorises them. Their battle is between happiness and unhappiness and the young girl’s spirit is unbreakable. She refuses to live, as Mrs Winterson does, in End Time.

Yet there is a sense she feels she understood Mrs Winterson too late. “She died just before I was 30,” she says. “There was not a lot of time and the only person who could have sorted it out was me. And I wasn’t ready to make it right. So it could only be as it was. Strangely, the conversation does not stop. I go on trying to understand her, and in an odd way she goes on evolving. Death isn’t quite the barrier it seems.”

Did she write Oranges in an attempt to reach out to her? “I don’t know,” she says after a long pause. “Well, I suppose I sent it to her. She did order it [under another name] but I also sent her one, dedicated from me. And she kept it. She hadn’t been able to bring herself to throw it on the fire with everything else.” She laughs.

The last time they saw each other was during her first year at Oxford, over the Christmas break. “We could not talk to each other,” she says. “There was really nowhere to go after that. I felt very betrayed by her response to Oranges and she felt very betrayed that I’d written it. If at that point she had been able to say ‘Well, I don’t like it, but I’m proud of you’,” she switches to a broad Lancashire accent, “or if there had been a bridge, a rope slung across space … it would have made a difference. But there was nothing.”

She died during transmission of the BBC series of Oranges. “Marvellous, really,” Winterson says with a half-smile, reminding me of the moment in the memoir when she tells her about loving women and Mrs Winterson’s varicose vein explodes, hitting the ceiling with a crimson splash. “What control … she just would. And she was only 68. She had the enlarged heart, the prolapse, the thyroid condition. But I think she died of unhappiness. I really do. And what’s so sad is her way out of that was me. No question. But she couldn’t take it.”

By 2008, Winterson’s relationship with the theatre director Deborah Warner had just ended. She had found her adoption paper, which showed she had been breastfed by her birth mother. It was also different to the one she found as a child, which turned out to be about a boy the Wintersons hadn’t been able to adopt before she came along. They had bought baby clothes for him, which ended up on her. “Presumably somewhere Paul is out there, missing one set of baby clothes!” she chuckles. “It’s very funny. Such a joke against the self that all this time you think it [sexuality] is about choice and in the end, no, it’s that you started life as a boy.” She laughs her head off.

But when all this came to light she was in a bad way. Holed up in her cottage in the Cotswalds, away from London where she has a flat above her own deli, she lost her mind. “It was very frightening,” she says. “I needed to feel it otherwise it would have gone underground and come back very viciously. You can’t escape something enormous in your life like that. You just can’t.”

Did it come on slowly? “No, it was a very rapid descent. I was no longer coping. I didn’t have anything consistent or steady. That goes completely, and it’s very frightening especially if you’re a control freak. And what’s really bad is that one day you can feel quite well and think oh, it’s over. That’s why it’s like a haunted house. Just as you think it’s clean this invisible force will come back. That’s very scary because you know it’s all in your head, yet you are also in your head.”

Eventually, she thought that ‘If I cannot live, I must die’. And so she locked herself in her garage and turned on the engine. “I thought I would rather be dead than on drugs,” she says. “And if that was the only way, I was absolutely sure that death was a better choice. It’s a very decisive moment when you decide to kill yourself. It is a point in time. There is the moment before and the moment after … because in my case, it didn’t work … fortunately.

Later, she woke up on the gravel. “It was the shock of being alive and suddenly wanting to be … when you actually do it, you are on automatic pilot. You’re not thinking, now I will go into the garage and kill myself. At that point the balance of the mind is so disturbed that there is no thought. So to come out of that was like a sort of electric shock treatment. I did feel jolted back. I thought I must see if I can survive this in a real way. I must try and get better.”

She describes speaking to “the creature” inside her, part Caliban, part Mrs Winterson, for an hour a day to try and deal with her madness. “The dialogue with the creature was bizarre. I would talk as I am talking to you now. It wasn’t some puppet theatre. It was very real. We would set the time every day and do it.”

Slowly Winterson got better. It’s another remarkable turnaround, and another remarkable chapter in the story. Once again, she has pulled it off. Got out. Done it on her own. She is in a good place now; in a loving, stable relationship with Orbach. She continues to see her birth mother, Ann, and she made peace with her father before he died. The conversation with Mrs Winterson, meanwhile, goes on. It’s a sad story, a funny story, a brave story, and it’s not done yet.

“This is my nature and it has remained so,” she says with a shrug. “Now, on the other side of the garage, the person that’s me is still full of energy for life. That hasn’t gone away. I feel confident about survival ... at present. I’m not giving up and I’m not giving in. I’m not prepared to let force of circumstance come in and tell me how to live. And that hasn’t changed.” She starts laughing. “That’s just me, isn’t it?”

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £14.99.