Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit

by Jeanette Winterson

book data

4,279 ratings, 3.76 average rating, 280 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		22%
4		39%
3		29%
2		6%
1		1%

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published

August 20th 1997 (first published 1985) by Grove Press

binding

Paperback, 192 pages

url

http://www.jeanettewinterson.com/pages/c...

setting

The United Kingdom

literary awards

Whitbread Award for a First Novel (1985)

isbn

0802135161 (isbn13: 9780802135162)

description

Jeanette is a bright and rebellious orphan who is adopted into an evangelical household in the dour, industrial North of England and finds herself emb...more

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other reviews (showing 1-20 of 5,429)

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10/25/07

Lishesque rated it:

Read in October, 2007

recommended to Lishesque by: Carnunee

You need a lot of patience for Jeanette Winterson's weird little Beowulfesque tangents, but if you can get past that, there are little gems of brilliant clarity scattered throughout.

For me, this bit redeems all the boring parts:

"But where was God now, with heaven full of astronauts, and the Lord overthrown? I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature be...more

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05/31/07

lori mitchell rated it:

(review of isbn 0099935708)

bookshelves: myfavorites

favorite excerpts:

"I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don't think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don't even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it."

"As it is, I can't settle, I want someone who is fierce and will love me until death and will love me un...more

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09/13/07

Sundry rated it:

Read in June, 2007

Middle of the night. Just finished the last book. See me in my p.j.s cruising the prime section of my bookshelves, where the novels I expect to reread reside.

I’ve read this book at least 3 times since I bought it shortly after it came out in paperback.

Jeanette, Jeanette. You are such a puzzle. Part of each of your books thrills me in that way a writer gets thrilled when she reads work she really would like to emulate. And then I find myself skimming other parts.

...more

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09/15/08

Claudia F. rated it:

Read in August, 2008

Gawd-alive, I love this woman's work. I've now read her books totally out of order, but who cares? I'm on a memoir kick at the moment. This is one of the best memoirs I've ever read, and, honey, I've read a few! So funny, it will make oatmeal shoot out of your nose. But, also, so beautiful and tender. It discusses the pain and desire of trying to belong in a completely unique way. This woman is a master!

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04/10/08

Brandy rated it:

bookshelves: 2008reads

Read in September, 2008

You know what? No, I'm not going to bother saying much about this. It's Jeanette Winterson. The people who like her will already want to read this; the people who don't like her won't be swayed by this fictionalized memoir (or memoir-ized fiction). It's great. That's really all you need to know.

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02/23/09

Leela rated it:

Read in March, 2009

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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01/29/09

Rumoku rated it:

I always wondered how to reconcile homosexuality and religion. For the most part, you can't. Homosexuality, according to most religions, is an aberration. The protagonist of this story (who for the life of me I can't seem to remember) had the same problem: if God loves all, why can't I be loved for what I am? I had a friend who was in the same sort of predicament. As gay as a rainbow, he was, but a nice chap through and through, but he couldn't be gay and religious at the same time. He oft...more

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08/08/07

Bethany rated it:

bookshelves: fiction-and-literature

Read in September, 2007

This book was intriguing. It is a coming of age story of a girl adopted by a pentecostal evangelist. The author tells the story in the first person, along with short bits of fairy tales. The fairy tales continue the story - and you realize what is happening to the main character by what happens to the main character in the fairy tales.

The author makes some incredible observations of what it is like to separate badly and thoroughly with your family. "Going back after a long t...more

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03/31/09

Victoria rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in January, 2006

I tried to read Written on the Body for a university module a few years ago. I found it pretentious and annoying, couldn't finish it and swore off Jeanette Winterson for good. Until I received this one from a friend. Of course, I was unsure about starting it.

Read this book in about 3 days and really enjoyed it. I related to the character a lot, especially in relation to her escape from the church (although of course, my experiences were no where near as severe as hers!!)

...more

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06/12/09

Kylin rated it:

Read in May, 2009

Jeanette Winterson is one of my favorite writers and I wasn't disappointed with this, her first book. It was interesting to see that the themes of gender and sexual identity, adoption, and time(lessness) in her other works have been there from the beginning. The protagonist, also named Jeanette, is adopted by an English evangelical mother. More concerned with her church work, the mother only seems to make contact with her daughter to groom her to be a missionary. Jeanette is enthusiastic about h...more

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04/13/09

Jessica rated it:

bookshelves: advisory-books--2008-2009

This book really showed how religion can affect someone's life. Jeanette's mother is so into religion that she trains her daughter to only look at the world through religion. It was hard to believe that one person can be so into his or her religion... In the book, the people in the church believe Jeanette's hearing problems and being a lesbian has to do with demons, and they torture her to get the "demons" out like not letting her eat for 36 hours. The book really shows people a differ...more

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11/20/08

Hannah Farmer rated it:

bookshelves: book-club

Read in November, 2008

recommends it for: women

In what I am assuming is an autobiographical account of her less than normal childhood, Jeannette Winterson weaves fantastic and biblical fables in with her witty narrative to tell her coming-of-age tale. Each chapter draws its title sequentially from the first 8 books of the Bible, and the author does a great job of fitting her story to the themes from each of those books. She successfully sheds traditional plot forms to tell the story of her horrible, though I guess well-intentioned evangeli...more

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07/01/09

Carolyn rated it:

Read in March, 2005

Is this novel concerned more with sexual politics or postmodern practice? If the task for the lesbian feminist postmodern author (say that 3 times fast) is to "displace and explode the binary," as Laura Doan argues, then I'm not sure Oranges has accomplished its aim, because binarism is alive and well by the end. Winterson pays lip service to postmodernist literary tactics and does not extend a critical eye far enough. Instead of utilizing tactics of unsettling, binary-displacement/�...more

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01/31/09

Rachel rated it:

Read in March, 1998

I read this one years ago, but it was memorable because it was cleverly written. As some people have pointed out, it was not written with bitterness, more with a bewildered kind of amusement. And the fruit metaphor worked hear - in the hands of a less talented writer, it probably would have seemed lame, but the author pulls it off. And I thought the relationship between the author and her mother was realistic. Towards the end, when the mother (a narrow-minded fundamentalist who always says "...more

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12/01/08

Nocturnal rated it:

Read in December, 2008

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

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12/05/08

Istop4books rated it:

bookshelves: lit-and-fiction

Read in December, 2008

Received through paperbackswap.com because the author was highly recommended by someone on Ravelry. HOnestly? I just didn't like it. I thought the premise was good, some bits were funny, many were poignant, but the quirkiness just detracted from the overall readability for me.

It's a coming of age story of a young girl, who is being brought up by a lady who is a fundamentalist christian and a bit bizarre. The funny bits come in when the girl goes to school and starts drawing pictures ...more

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01/16/09

Jess rated it:

bookshelves: fiction

Read in March, 2009

If nothing else, I found this novel to be very intriguing. It was interesting to follow Jeanette on her quest to acceptance of herself and her homosexuality. I loved the interwoven tales/fairytales, and I thought that the point of them rang true--no stories or accounts of life can be true because they can't be objective. I had to read this book for my Women & Literature class, and we all had a bunch of interesting discussions in light of all of the different aspects of this book. I think the thi...more

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02/09/09

Stephanie rated it:

This is one of my favorite books, ever. My favorite line from this book:

I could have been a priest instead of a prophet. The priest has a book with the words set out. Old words, known words, words of power. Words that are always on the surface. The words work. They do what they are supposed to do; comfort and discipline. The prophet has no book. The prophet is a voice that cries in the wilderness, full of sounds that do not always set into meaning. The prophets cry out becau...more

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03/27/09

Katie S marked it as to-read

bookshelves: a-we-ll-see, fiction, global, homophobia--, lgbtq, novel, pol-paradigm-shift-pssbl, politics-learning, to-read, women

Sounds like a horrible, tragic conflict, and one that I just feel is so, so wrong. I mean, within the family, I guess that's up to them. But these days there are multiple strands within multiple religions that are open and affirming. Of course it isn't universal just yet, but seems to be going strongly in that direction. So, part of me is a bit uninterested, since I'm so much more about how it works to change that.
Still though, sounds well-written and like it has interesting content and a...more

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12/24/08

Jamie rated it:

bookshelves: 1001-books-before-you-die, summer-reading-list-09

Read in June, 2009

recommended to Jamie by: indirectly, Professor Gray
recommends it for: Winterson fans, those interested in lesbian memoirs, magical realism

Background: Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) is a recent discovery, thanks to my incredible—now former—thesis advisor, who suggested I check out her novel The Passion. Ever anxious to please, and interested after hearing shining things from another friend who had read it, I grabbed a brand spanking new copy of the novel from Barnes & Noble as a Christmas present for myself. Now, if you know what a compulsive used-book buyer I am (I binged on half.com the other day, in fact!), my buying a bran...more Background: Jeanette Winterson (b. 1959) is a recent discovery, thanks to my incredible—now former—thesis advisor, who suggested I check out her novel The Passion. Ever anxious to please, and interested after hearing shining things from another friend who had read it, I grabbed a brand spanking new copy of the novel from Barnes & Noble as a Christmas present for myself. Now, if you know what a compulsive used-book buyer I am (I binged on half.com the other day, in fact!), my buying a brand new book is fairly momentous. And momentous was the result: The Passion wowed me in every possible sense; the prose was like glittering velvet, the characters fleshy and whole, the plot and elements of magical realism were glittering and engrossing. It concerns an androgynous young trickster woman who becomes involved with a soldier from Napoleon’s army—the plot details themselves aren’t all that showy, but Winterson’s verve makes all the difference. I can’t say anything but that it was one of my favorite novels of the year thus far.

That said, I went into Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit with similarly high expectations. Keep in mind that this is a sort of fictionalized memoir about her rather unique growing pains; Winterson was on the path to become a Pentecostal missionary, raised by a truly cracked out evangelical mother, when she began to experiment and come to terms with her sexuality—which, as it turns out, leaned more towards women than towards men (or perhaps preferably, in her mother’s mind, to chastity through Christ). The ‘novel,’ in turn, follows these awkward experiences, beginning with Jeanette’s childhood in a hyper-religious community and following her up through her excommunication, so to speak, from said community (along with some interesting uses of exorcism). Winterson weaves in elements of myth, fairytales, and legends; Perceval of Arthuriana makes a few cameos, as do interesting accounts of another knight’s quest for perfection, and a young girl’s enslavement to a father-wizard. With these and biblical references so abundant, Winterson’s own history becomes inextricable from the sort of quest narratives we’re all familiar with, even if we aren’t particularly knowledgeable about evangelism or lesbian experience.

Ultimately, Oranges didn’t quite live up to my expectations, having read The Passion, but not because it wasn’t a good novel—because, I think, it was so pervasively quirky and frequently hilarious. It was, simply, different from her other novel, which was seductive and magical and foreboding and powerful—but not all that humorous or naïve. These are almost inevitable when dealing with the sort of experiences Winterson narrates here, and she certainly makes them work. Perhaps I’ve overdosed on the lesbian comint out memoir—I took a course last semester that dealt a lot with this, and read things like Ann Bannon’s I Am a Woman and Rita Mae Brown’s Rubyfruit Jungle; in effect, I felt like I’d gone through some of this before, though the religious aspect of Winterson’s text certainly raised the stakes. I suppose my one legitimate complaint was that there were times where I felt the novel could have elaborated further—I was often lost in a sea of names; Mrs. This and Mrs. That—who are they again? And why the hell do I care about them, if you give me nothing to go on? Though The Passion was also quite short, the characters were fewer, and each felt whole to me. Here, I understood the positions of the primary characters, but the supporting cast felt unfortunately like tracework at times. In any case, I hear this novel is pretty much Winterson 101, if you’re interested. I have my complaints, but they’re mere surface—the novel itself is quite good, often laugh-out-loud funny, and Winterson is such a skilled writer that a handful of passages from the novel make the entirety worth it. I’ll leave you with one of these:

I miss God. I miss the company of someone utterly loyal. I still don’t think of God as my betrayer. The servants of God, yes, but servants by their very nature betray. I miss God who was my friend. I don’t even know if God exists, but I do know that if God is your emotional role model, very few human relationships will match up to it. I have an idea that one day it might be possible, I thought once it had become possible, and that glimpse has set me wandering, trying to find the balance between earth and sky. If the servants hadn’t rushed in and parted us, I might have been disappointed, might have snatched off the white samite to find a bowl of soup. As it is, I can’t settle…
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quotes from this book

"The unknownness of my needs frightens me. I do now know how huge they are, or how high they are, I only know that they are not being met. If you want to find out the circumference of an oil drop, you can use lycopodium powder. That’s what I’ll find. A tub of lycopodium powder, and I will sprinkle it on to my needs and find out how large they are. Then when I meet someone I can write up the experiment and show them what they have to take on." More quotes...