So too in life, as she riposted to her daughter's new-found success as an author: "Jeanette, why be happy when you could be normal?" (Weirdly enough, Winterson told us, she actually died while watching the second episode of the television version.) In the book, the narrator's unnamed mother is never stumped for a response to the world's ungodly ways. "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. In a pre-arranged conversation down the line from London to a public phone box in Accrington, Winterson had tried to explain "it's not about us in any real way". The reaction of the novelist's adoptive mother, "Mrs Winterson", was still alive in her memory. W hen Jeanette Winterson discussed Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit at the Guardian book club, we could not get away from the responses of one particular reader.
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