Jeanette Winterson: all about my mother | Books | The Guardian: "Jeanette Winterson: all about my mother."
Winterson learnt to read from Deuteronomy (her parents possessed only six books, three of which were bibles).
When her mother burnt her treasured hidden store of paperbacks, Jeanette Winterson decided the time had come to start writing herself. She looks back on how her loveless upbringing led to her becoming a writer"
Jeanette Winterson was a twenty-something literary sensation back in the 1980s.
Her first book, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, a raw, taboo-busting semi-autobiographical novel about being adopted, being abused, and being a lesbian.
In the years afterwards, the author railed against those who would ask her - how much of it is true, how much of it really happened?
But now Jeanette Winterson appears to have answered her own question. S
he's just published her memoir and the truth, she writes, is even more painful.
"I needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence."
"Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?" (2011)
Jeanette Winterson.
Funny, acute, fierce and celebratory, this is a tough-minded search for belonging, for love, an identity, a home, and a mother.
Jeanette Winterson's adoptive mother, July 1945. 
