Jeanette Winterson

"There are more than two chances– many more. I know now, after fifty years, that the finding/losing, forgetting/remembering, leaving/returning, never stops. The whole of life is about another chance, and while we are alive, till the very end, there is always another chance. (p.38)"

"I was a miracle in that I could have taken her out of her life and into a life she would have liked a lot. It never happened, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there to happen. All of that has been a brutal lesson to me in not overlooking or misunderstanding what is actually there, in your hands, now. We always think the thing we need to transform everything– the miracle– is elsewhere, but often it is right next to us. Sometimes it is us, ourselves. (p.31)"

"Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be;"

""Why be happy when you could be normal?" Constance Winterson, adoptive mother of Jeanette Winterson."

"Born in Manchester in 1959, Winterson was given up for adoption, and her primary parental figure became her adoptive mother, whom Winterson almost always refers to as Mrs. Winterson. A zealot, Mrs. Winterson forbade her daughter books, scolded her for being “born bad” and saw the world “as a battleground between good and evil.” The author, who would come out as a lesbian at age 16 and escape this suffocating household, explored her upbringing, to great acclaim, in her 1985 debut novel, “,” and again in her more exacting 2011 memoir, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?” Mrs. Winterson haunts this newest work too, as a sultan of sorts, a powerful and intimate overlord her daughter must best."

"The book that made me want to write was The Passion by Jeanette Winterson. It made me feel that historical fiction didn’t have to be fusty and all about bodices, that it could be a thrilling novel, which just happened to be set in 1800."

"Would it be too much to read Winterson’s Christmas collection as an attempt, finally, to make peace and come to terms with her past? The evidence is there in the inclusion of the for her father’s favorite , which she made out of tinned fruit and only a few days before he died."

"When Jeanette Winterson discussed ' at the Guardian book club, we could not get away from the responses of one particular reader. The reaction of the novelist's adoptive mother, "Mrs Winterson", was still alive in her memory. "She was livid". In a pre-arranged conversation down the line from London to a in , Winterson had tried to explain "it's not about us in any real way". Her mother was not having any of it. "It's the first time I've had to order a book in a false name." Perhaps she would have come to accept the novel, but it would have taken more years than she had left. (Weirdly enough, Winterson told us, she actually died while watching the second episode of the .) In the book, the narrator's unnamed mother is never stumped for a response to the world's ungodly ways. So too in life, as she d to her daughter's new-found success as an author: "Jeanette, why be happy when you could be normal?""

"Jeanette Winterson once asked her adoptive mother — stringently immortalised in her first novel ' — why they couldn't have books in the house. "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," answered the peerless Mrs Winterson. As advertisements for reading go, it's pretty seductive. But it also happens to be wonderfully true of this vivid, unpredictable and sometimes mind-rattling memoir. You start it expecting one thing — a wry retake of her gothic upbringing – and come out having been subjected to one of the more harrowing and candid investigations of mid-life breakdown I've ever read. This book is definitely of the sort that Mrs Winterson feared most: truths that most of us find hard to face, explored in a way that disturb, challenge, upset and inspire. And so yes, by the time I realised what it was really about and what it was going to do to me, it was definitely far "too late"."