Jeanette Winterson at The Quarterly Conversation

Our latest piece at The Quarterly Conversation is Lauren Elkin’s essay on Jeanette Winterson. It’s all about how Winterson’s books trace out an interesting relationship to reality, and how that reality is transmuted into her work:

Winterson has always told and retold the same fictions: of parents and children; of origins, and adoptions; of differences, of margins; of love; of passion; she has always manipulated rhythm and language as an excavation of sources. Much of her fiction mirrors what we know of Winterson’s own story, but she agitates against the idea that her work has to be considered as fiction or autobiography, laying claim to both. In Art Objects she writes: “The question put to the writer ‘How much of this is based on your own experience?’ is meaningless. All or nothing may be the answer. The fiction, the poem, is not a version of the facts, it is an entirely different way of seeing”; a “separate reality.” At every turn she eludes the critic, the interviewer, the reader; she offers truth, but not the truth. “I’m telling you stories. Trust me.”