I've been intending to read this ever since it came out, but never quite got to it until now. Having seen her at the Auckland Writers' Festival recently, it became essential post-Festival reading. In a way, it's a non-fiction version of her early novel Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, a kind of silent twin to that book. Jeannette Winterson is able to move from extreme humour to extraordinary painful and sad events with equal ease. It's the story of her early life as an adopted child in the north of England; adopted by a fanatical Pentecostal mother. A flamboyant depressive, Mrs Winterson built her family rules around her extreme interpretation of the bible, which didn't chime well with Jeanette's passionate hunger for books, and later, other girls.
This is a short, very honest memoir, heartbreaking in its intensity, but also hilariously funny. An extraordinary book.