Would you say now that she was severely depressed? It was very useful to a child on the alert for language. She used to say things like ‘The Bible tells us to turn the other cheek, but there’s only so many cheeks in a day.’ She used to pin these aphorisms up around the walls: both texts from the Bible – ‘Man shall not live by bread alone,’ which was over the oven – and things for me: ‘Think of God, not the dog.’ That’s how we lived: in this world of text. It’s a good line, and she did have a lot of good lines, because she was a very intelligent woman.

The title of your memoir, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, is something she said when she kicked you out at 16… And actually I don’t need to knowĪnd yet your adoptive mother told you that the Devil had led her to the wrong crib. My inclination would be that there probably is something bigger than we are in the universe, some forming intelligence of some kind but I don’t know what it is. Both of my parents thought that God loved everybody. Except in race relations – it was their extremely odd and rather endearing characteristic that they’d never, ever discriminate against a person for the colour of their skin. They would have been progressive if they hadn’t been doing it – and whatever the Wintersons were, they weren’t progressive. No one thought – and my parents certainly didn’t think – they were being cruel, nor were they doing anything which made them look different to anyone else in the street or the church. Yes, it is, but at the time it wasn’t understood as that. Nobody thought it was wrong or odd to really wallop your children, or even to knock your spouse around. I mean, I wouldn’t get too excited about that. You were routinely beaten, locked in the coalhole, left on the doorstep overnight – Well, Oranges is many things – a funny book, a work of fiction, a work of literature.

Much of that formed the basis of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit 1 Pandora Books, 1985 – but according to your recent memoir 2 Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? (Vintage Books, 2012) the truth was even grimmer… It was a working-class household it was poor – no toilet, no phone, no car, no nothing – and certainly no books, but not for reasons of poverty but rather because Mrs Winterson was convinced that anything secular would do enormous damage to the spiritual and they had to be rigidly separated. I was brought up in Accrington by Pentecostals, who intended that I should be a missionary and serve the Lord and save souls. Could you tell us a little about your childhood?

1985 novel by jeanette winterson