The medieval alchemists had it wrong: the real treasure is beauty wrought from pain. And novelist Jeanette Winterson has the gift.
She will receive the St. Louis Literary Award on September 23 at Saint Louis University. She received the Rapallo international writer’s prize this summer in Italy, and in 2006 she was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire for “services to literature.”
But her childhood prophesied none of that glamour.
Adopted by grimly Pentecostal parents, she was brought up in a Lancashire mill town and groomed to be a missionary. Her parents owned only six books—but one of them was Morte d’Arthur, and Winterson fell in love with the written word. The house had no bathroom, so she could sneak in more books and read them by flashlight in the outhouse. Her mother was neither gentle nor forgiving—inspiring Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which won the Whitbread First Novel award and became an international bestseller.
She kept writing: Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?; Written on the Body; Sexing the Cherry; The Stone Gods; Gut Symmetries... Her novels had poetry’s elegance, memoir’s raw honesty; and unexpected depths of compassion. But just as she’d had to fight to defend her lesbian sexual orientation in her parents’ compressed world, she had to fight to prove her literary merit at a time when a woman writing about women was easily dismissed. Rejection made her fierce, a talent to be reckoned with. In 1993, asked to name the best novel of the year, she nominated her own, Written on the Body. The shock waves still reverberate, two decades later.
Winterson does not play to the crowd, and she does not always play nicey-nice. So I breathed a little shamefaced relief when I was told she was in Australia and would have to answer questions by email. I waited weeks for a response, assuming she was fed up with media when, as it turned out, she was simply in the rainforest. Back from her travels, she answered, in order, the first 15 questions from my list of 24.
You wrote beautifully about the conflict between wild urges to be free and “the tame heart that wants to come home.” How have you learned to reconcile the two?
The balance between the wild and the tame is a balance we cannot get right—whether in the natural world, or in the personal world, or in our created societal structures.
In the natural world we destroy or domesticate, increasingly corralling the wild into nature reserves or national parks. We do not seem to care about what we do to the planet. We have upset the eco-balance so badly that it is likely that earth will cease to support human life in any realistic way in the not too distant future.
In the personal realm we go on weekend binges because we cannot bear our boxed-in lives. We have affairs, crash the car, gun down the neighbors. We stay married but get addicted to internet porn. Boys go badass because there is no other way of asserting individuality over conformity.
In society we let global capitalism behave like a Jurassic Park predator while humans cower under falling living standards and accept political powerlessness as a way of life.
The schizophrenia our lives engender is medicated away. That doesn’t mean it is gone.
Another of your famous quotes: “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.” What parts of you are out there living what kinds of lives?
Choices matter. It is fine to make mistakes. But we have to learn by our mistakes. Most people go on repeating their life history in various disguises. That was Freud’s profound understanding; that unless we recognize the past we are doomed to repeat it. This happens at national and governmental levels as well as at personal levels.
The choices we don’t make—the lives we don’t lead—stay with us. Either this is useful or it is baleful.
The point—as with everything—is to be conscious. This is the hardest thing of all.
What’s been the most intense struggle of your life? The greatest tension? The deepest joy?
Struggle? Life is about struggle. Your enemy is passivity not struggle.
As a culture, do we understand passion?
Passion is energy. The way we live—nonstop TV, internet, fast food, meaningless work, incessant noise and distraction, no life of the mind, makes energy impossible. You get frenetic craziness, especially when people are younger and the animal life force is strong, but that soon drains away, and you get the depressed vacant-eyed unhappy people we see on the streets wandering like refugees in their own life.
If you can love something, anything, for its own sake, and follow it, you have a chance of escaping the flatness of processed and packaged existence. If not—you have no chance. Rich or poor. Worse for the poor, always.
How do you define God?
I don’t define God. Too big a subject. Not my job. If there is a God then human definitions are flights of fancy. If not, might as well shut up on the matter.
What's the most startling thing you ever learned about yourself?
That I can love another person well—well for that person and well for me.
You called yourself, as a girl, “too spiky, too angry, too intense, too odd.” Has that fierce intensity mellowed with time?
No.
What do you envision as the future of marriage, however you define it? How do you think we will view sexual orientation in another 50 years?
Marriage was invented by human beings. We can re-invent it any way we like. We know that people like commitment. We know that kids need stable relationships with adults who love them. Of course I believe that any two people of any gender should be able to make a primary commitment to each other. Maybe, if we can develop as human beings, it might be possible to have legal frameworks that involve more than two people but are not simply about contempt for women. At present polygamy is about men having it their own way (what’s new?) but that could change.
What I find utterly wrong right now is the refusal of some countries or states to accept marriages that are legally binding in the country of origin.
The world will end for all sorts of reasons. It won’t end because women can marry women and men can marry men.
Your writing catches the reader’s breath with its raw honesty. Do you wish everyone were capable of such honesty, or would it be dangerous in hands less sensitive?
Writing is a lie-detector. It starts with the lie in yourself.
You’ve written that your mistakes were “not errors of judgement but failures of feeling.” Such as...?
This isn’t Oprah.
What, in the universe, causes you to feel awed? Inspired? Disgusted?
The world is full of beauty. We are lucky to have this planet, this chance at life. I do not understand why the rich want to get richer at any cost to the rest of us, even though that psychosis dressed up as the free market, is ruining everything we have
What’s been your life’s biggest gamble?
My whole life is a gamble. What you risk reveals what you value.
You’ve described yourself, and other adopted children, as “self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb.” What advice would you give to an adopted child?
Adopted kids are outsiders. Even if the adoption family is a good one the wound never heals. But if you can learn to work from the outside, to work from the wound, then you can get somewhere. I think adopted kids have special work to do. The whole world is turning into one big refugee camp. A place of dispossession—literally and figuratively. If you know fundamentally what it is like not be wanted, not to belong, to try and make a home in someone else’s home, then you know a lot about the way the world is now.
You’ve noted that people often feel powerless and overwhelmed. Is there a way to move backward from that, to a place that feels more manageable and engaged?
The only way you stop feeling powerless is to take back power. I believe we have to organize publicly and privately. All of us can change something—both in our own circumstances and in our near community, and then push it bigger, into the wider world.
The moment you change something you feel great—and that gives you the strength to do more.
You’ve said, “To learn how to heal yourself seems to me to be the most important thing that you can do because at that moment you are genuinely self-reliant, and if other people hurt you — as they will — it won’t matter because you have now in your own hands the tools of healing.” What should everyone learn about how to heal themselves?
Listen, I am not a 10 Steps Guru. What do I know? You work at it, is what I know. Whatever you want, you work at it. You’ve got this one life. Remember that every day and everyday try and offer one act of kindness to yourself, one act of kindness to someone else. Kindness is so important and not fashionable anymore. We’re either downtrodden or too busy pushing others out of the way. Yet those little daily acts do make a difference—and as much in self-awareness as anything else.
T.S. Eliot wrote that “humankind cannot bear very much reality.” What kinds of reality are hardest for you to bear?
OK, that’s enough!
Winterson’s award ceremony will begin at 5:30 p.m. September 23 in the Anheuser-Busch Auditorium at Saint Louis University’s John Cook School of Business. The ceremony, which is free and open to the public, will be preceded by a 4:30 p.m. signing. The award is conferred by the Saint Louis University Library Associates; previous honorees include William Styron, Joan Didion, Chinua Achebe, John Updike, and Mario Vargas Llosa.
