I took to wandering up and down the street asking for food. Mrs Winterson came after me and that was the first time I heard the dark story of the Devil and the crib.
In the crib next to me had been a little boy called Paul. He was my ghostly brother because his sainted self was always invoked when I was naughty. Paul would not have filled his poodle pyjama case with tomatoes so that he could perform a stomach operation with blood-like squish. If they had taken Paul instead of me, it would have been different, better.
I was supposed to be a pal. And then her mother died and she shut herself up in her grief. I shut myself up in the larder because I had learned how to use the little key that opened the tins of corned beef. The memory is surrounded by roses, which is odd because it is a violent and upsetting memory, but my grandad was a keen gardener and he particularly loved roses. I liked finding him, shirtsleeves rolled up, wearing a knitted waistcoat and spraying the blooms with water from a polished copper can with a piston pressure valve.
He liked me, in an odd sort of way, and he disliked my mother, and she hated him — not in an angry way, but with a toxic submissive resentment. I am wearing my favorite outfit—a cowboy suit and a fringed hat. My small body is slung from side to side with cap-gun Colts. A woman comes into the garden and Grandad tells me to go inside and find my mother who is making her usual pile of sandwiches.
I am peeping from down the hallway. Mrs Winterson slams the door and leans on it for a second. I creep out of my peeping place. She turns around. There I am in my cowboy outfit.
How does Jeanette become reconciled to her birth story and adoption? The one that writes you is dangerous. In many ways Mrs Winterson is the powerful center of the book. Do you agree? How does Jeanette deal with this likelihood of a crazy mother?
She secretly reads books she sneaks into the house and hides under her mattress. The exception was the Bible, read out loud. What did the King James language give to Jeanette and to many others? Think about the child in her nightgown, clutching at volumes before they go up in flames. What does Eliot say? These fragments have I shored against my ruin. In the aftermath of the book purging, what does Jeanette understand about herself?
She is on her own emotionally and intellectually, but does she begin to see that as a strength? How does Jeanette relate her own reactions to violence, and some she is subjected to, in the context of a generalized brutality in working class northern England? Think of the ramifications of generations of poverty, lack of education, and angry frustration.
It did not modify my behavior. Kids fought all the time. I used to hit my girlfriends until I realied it was not acceptable. Literature—A to Z—gives the growing child a lifeline. How does Jack and the Beanstalk provide myths she can latch onto? Not only the fairy tales and comic strips about triumphant underdogs appeal to her, but why were quest stories so important? I have gone on working with the Grail stories all my life.
Why does the following passage from Murder in the Cathedral by T. Eliot resonate strongly with the author? The second failure was definitely not my fault. I had no one to help me, but the T. Eliot helped me. A tough life needs a tough language—and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers—a language powerful enough to say how it is.
Does she spare herself? Explain how Jeanette rolls us into both the calamity of her life and the joke of her own response. What other writers operate this way? Who are some of the compelling women she writes about in the memoir? Remember, too, her perplexity and growing anger at finding almost no women on the library shelves.
Thus Jeanette begins an account of a depression that immobilized her. It is a harrowing tale. How does madness intersect with the quest and her writing? Did therapy help her? What was her attitude toward medication? It gave me back a sense of control.
On bad days I just held onto the thinning rope. The rope was poetry. What are the other life lines Jeanette clings to in her despair? Language left me. I was in the place before I had any language. A love affair has failed, and she feels she will always be seeking home. But she has a persistent drive for life and the creativity that has gone underground. And more. What does she think of her blood mother and family? Are you surprised by her thoughts? I notice that I hate Aann criticizing Mrs Winterson.
Share This. Grove Press. Church was every night except Thursdays. I went to a phone box—I had no phone. She went to a phone box—she had no phone I dialed the Accrington code and number as instructed, and there she was—who needs Skype?
A woman comes by and I know her. She gives me a bag of chips. She knows what my mother is like Inside our house the light is on. There was no Elsie. There was no one like Elsie. Things were much lonelier than that. But even when I did make friends I made sure it went wrong.
I had no idea. I thought that love was loss. Why is the measure of love loss? Mrs Winterson would have preferred it if I had been silent. I have a memory—true or not true? I run in — Mrs Winterson takes off her apron and goes to answer the door. Then she runs upstairs. I go out into the garden. Grandad is spraying the roses.
He ignores me. There is no one there. Newsletters, offers and promotions delivered straight to your inbox. Enter Email Address I thought that love was loss. Winterson is the best kind of hero, deeply flawed, all swagger and pluck, and matched against an excellent villain.
Winterson as the author refers to her parent can confidently take her place among the demon mothers of life and literature, the Medeas and Mommie Dearests. She stuffed the child in the coalhole, locked her out overnight in bitter winters. When she discovered Jeanette was having a love affair with a female friend, Mrs.
Winterson arranged for an exorcism. The pride of the survivor pumps into each sentence as Winterson hauls her old ogre of a mother into the light and ticks off every offense. The hungry children idling outside the dog-biscuit factory, hoping for scraps. The laborers who would end their days with a class on Shakespeare for self-improvement. The geopolitics I sometimes found bold, and other times found too broad to be conclusive: "In a system that generates masses, individualism is the only way out.
But then what happens to community — to society? Unfortunately, when it overheated it beeped to warn the user. As the corset was by definition underneath her petticoat dress, apron and coat, there was little she could do to cool down except take off her coat and stand in the yard. And even with all this new, distressing detail, the story of her childhood ends well — it ends in escape. Then there's an odd page or two entitled "Intermission", which finishes: "The womb to tomb of an interesting life — but I can't write my own; never could.
Not Oranges. Not now. I would rather go on reading myself as a fiction than as a fact … I am going to miss out 25 years … Maybe later …". And suddenly we are on to territory which is alarming, moving, at times genuinely terrifying; skip forward a quarter century, and Winterson has just split up from her girlfriend, the theatre director Deborah Warner.
She finds her adoption papers in the effects of her dad, when he's moving to an old people's home. She has a nervous breakdown and attempts suicide. But often I could not talk.
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