This book brilliantly describes the process of coming to realize the fundamental worldview you’ve held and been exposed to for your whole life is predicated on a clear prejudice and lie about the world. Or at least a heavily crafted set of limitations. Jeanette, the narrator of this story, grows up in a fundementalist Christian community and only really begins to understand the completely bankrupt nature of this community when it turns out she is gay, and when she applies this understanding of herself to the worldview and community she always been a part of, she realizes she is meant to hate herself.
She’s quite fortunate to not actually want to do that and is able to break free. This is a book from 1985 and is charming and funny in a lot of ways, especially as we watch Jeanette read and love books and learn who she is and what she wants from the world. It’s also deeply sad and angering to realize that her mother and her church as positioned to be her biggest enemies in the world, not because of her choices, but because of the accident of her birth.
This clearly among the early Winterson novels, which I think include The Passion, Sexing the Cherry, and Written on the Body, and these four represent what I definitely think are the strongest of her writing. It’s a novel about self-discovery. It’s charming to read, and there’s a wonderful fervor and passion in the writing.
I will tell that as I was looking at other covers of the novel I came across how many different kinds of fruit the novel gets changed to in translation. But my favorite is the Spanish language translation “Fruita Prohibida”.
(Photo: https://www.amazon.com/Oranges-Are-Not-Only-Fruit/dp/0802135161/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3TZKV29LR19KM&keywords=oranges+are+not+the+only+fruit+by+jeanette+winterson&qid=1550672668&s=gateway&sprefix=oranges+are%2Caps%2C197&sr=8-1)