Jeanette Winterson at Sydney Opera House | Sydney Writers' Festival 2012

thank you very much [Applause] thank you hello thank you well here we are and they said i would be free to roam about the stage like some wild beast i said no chairs no lectin i just want to be in this intimate space this naked space because one of the the the paradoxes of art of literature is that it is at the same time both intimacy and lovers talk the one to one the place we share the place where nobody else can go it's just you and me and we're together it's that and it's also the shared experience the collective place the place where we come together to celebrate to meet one another to know one another to find things out that surprises or perhaps to have some of our prejudices blown away perhaps to have some of our special moments cherished it's all of that and it comes together in this and you know people sometimes say to me well you know it's all very well for you but you can go home and write your books but oh it's not for everybody literature's not for everybody it's an elitist activity you know these festivals they're just crazy it's like kind of popcorn for the soul you know what is it really about and it seems to me that if you think about art as a luxury then what you're really saying is that being human is a luxury and that none of us have the right to be here tonight that we should all immediately go out and start making money for rupert murdoch or somebody um but i think it's more than that and i think that all of us now in a world which certainly in the west is largely secular in spite of intervention raids from the religious right i think we do live in a secular society but we do also wonder where the sacred has gone and we can't find language for that anymore we can't find a way of expressing that anymore the part of us that isn't to do with gdp that isn't to do with the national debt that isn't to do with gross income or the money you earn or your cv or what you look like above the event horizon but is to do with the inner life the place that we know exists people keep telling us that there is no such place but we know that there is because we find it in our dreams we find it in our imagination we find it in our emotional life sometimes the things that we don't even dare to admit one to another we find it in ourselves and that's the place that all art and literature i think in particular speaks to directly both to confirm that it's really there and to shore it up to celebrate it to offer a kind of resistance so it gives us a i always think of it as a kind of platinum shield inside of the self that allows us to ward off all those arrows and assaults um the endlessly assailers from the outside world telling us that they were this or that or with the other and we think but where in all of that am i you know the person who does have a soul it's still a useful word the soul and so is the spirit and i don't think that needs to be hijacked to religiosity or to the craziness as it is at the moment of fundamentalism we need to reclaim those things for ourselves the soul the spirit um not be afraid to have such things and not be afraid to speak out in praise of them in defense of them and always i think to stand up for what we believe is important which i think is the life of the mind the life of the heart these relationships that we have with one another and that we find in books and then when we talk to each other and that's what i'm here for tonight to talk to you to read to you about why i'd be happy when you could be normal and to share this experience so maybe there's some people here tonight who haven't read any of my books are there anybody in the audience would you could you put your hand up if you haven't read anything by janette winterson oh this is marvellous i can see them there anybody up here what dame edna calls the budget budgies up here in the cheap seats no yeah over here yeah this is the really sad side there's just a few of them the strings um well this isn't this is the moment then where i can save your soul you put your hand up i know there's something missing in your life brother sister you've come here tonight and you can share it with me because this is a gap this is a place that we can fill together you can find a way of leaving your emptiness here tonight in this concert hall and going away a different person and all you have to do is probably spend 9.99 on a book by jeanette winterson look it's better than billy graham my mother wanted me to be a missionary you could say she got what she wanted because i am a disciple of the word and an apostle of the word in the beginning was the word and for me as a small child words were everything language was is alive it wasn't a dry dusty place it wasn't a means of communication it was it is luminous lit up in every sense a place to visit a home i don't think that books make a home i think that they are a home and when i was 24 i published a book called oranges and not the only fruit which takes us back to the banana problem and some of you will know about it it's the story of a young girl we might as well call a jeanette why not but he was brought up in a pentecostal environment and there's the story i wanted to use myself as a fictional character i didn't see why i couldn't it seemed like a great idea um of course i've been dogged with it ever since because you know if milan cundra does it or henry miller you know everybody in the henry miller book is called henry miller but they're all novels nobody worries about that if men do it it's meta fiction if i do it it's autobiography i think there might be i think about some sexism here but we're not allowed to call it sexism anymore we have to call it asymmetrical judgment it's marvelous so there may be a little bit of asymmetry in the judgment there about how you use yourself as a fictional character how you become that place of of display and confrontation um as a kind of genie out of the bottle which is what i think we're meant to do when we make books you know we let something loose something that's bigger than ourselves um that rises up to its full height and then cannot be contained and has perhaps special powers to take us places where we haven't been before and i didn't expect i suppose 25 years after writing oranges that i would ever come back to that material i had no intention of doing so it was not my plan nor my purpose so it was as much a surprise to me as it was to everybody else when why be happy when you could be normal suddenly appeared as a fully fledged manuscript but sometimes books happen to you you don't happen to the books you don't form them you don't plan them it's like there's a sort of geothermal vent you know those scary places at the bottom of the sea that suddenly sprout up in a great geezer of energy and force you to go with them um above the surface over the event horizon um into your own unexpected place and that's what happened with why be happy i was keeping a diary for myself about the journey that's narrated in the second half of this book which is the journey to find my biological mother bioma as i call her i'd always thought she was dead because mrs winterson in one of her many dark narratives her endless arabian night narrations of life which broke off and continued from dawn till dusk or was veering off in a different direction she was never a linear thinker so if you have a problem with my work you know where to look so there was mrs winston telling me all of these stories and she always used to say that my biological mother was either dead or drunk or on drunk on drugs or that she'd exploded and that was one of them would have an exploding mother that you've never met um and naturally enough you don't want to really look too deeply into that place you know i thought that one set of crazy parents was enough i mean what on earth would possess me to go and find another set you know it was some kind of massachusetts you know what's the matter with you you know life is painful enough without adding to it purposefully but i did find uh something some paperwork by chance that caused me to think a that my mother was alive and b that i ought to go and look for her but that comes later in the story and the second half is really a kind of detective hunt for bioma and what happens but i'm going to read you a little bit from the beginning of why i'd be happy which appropriately enough is entitled the wrong crib so we'll now go and visit winterson world when my mother was angry with me which was often she said the devil led us to the wrong crib the image of satan taking time off from the cold war and mccarthyism to visit manchester 1960 purpose of visit to deceive mrs winterson has a flamboyant theatricality to it my mother was a flamboyant depressive a woman who kept a revolver in the duster drawer and the bullets in a tin of pledge a woman who stayed up all night baking cakes to avoid sleeping in the same bed as my father a woman with a prolapse a thyroid condition an enlarged heart an ulcerated leg that never healed and two sets of false teeth matte for every day and a pearlized set for best i don't know why she didn't couldn't have children i know that she adopted me because she wanted a friend she had none and because i was like a flare sent out into the world a way of saying that she was here a kind of x marks the spot she hated being a nobody and like all children adopted or not i have had to live out some of her unlived life we do that for our parents we don't really have any choice she was alive when my first novel oranges are not the only fruit was published in 1985 and it is semi-autobiographical it tells the story of a young girl adopted by pentecostal parents and the girl is supposed to grow up and be a missionary instead she falls in love with a woman disaster the girl leaves home gets herself to oxford university returns home to find her mother has built a broadcast radio and is beaming out the gospel to the heathen and the mother has a handle she's called kindly light and the novel begins like most people i lived for a long time with my mother and my father my father liked to watch the wrestling my mother liked to wrestle for most of my life i've been a bare-knuckle fighter the one who wins is the one who hits the hardest i was beaten as a child and i learned early never to cry if i was locked out overnight i sat on the doorstep till the milkman came drank both pints left the empty bottles to enrage my mother and walked to school we always walked we had no car and no bus money for me the average was five miles a day two miles for the round trip to school and three miles for the round trip to church and church was every night except thursdays i wrote about some of these things in oranges and when it was published my mother sent me a furious note in her immaculate copperplate handwriting demanding a phone call we hadn't seen each other for several years i'd left oxford and was scraping together a life and i'd written oranges young i was 25 when it was published i went to a phone booth i had no phone she went to a phone booth she had no phone i dialed the accrington code and number and there she was who needs skype i could see her through her voice her form solidifying in front of me as she talked she was a big woman tallish weighing around 200 pounds surgical stockings flat sandals a crippling dress and a nylon head scarf she would have done her face powder keep yourself nice but not her lipstick fast and loose she filled the phone box she was out of scale larger than life she was like a fairy story where size is approximate and unstable she loomed up she expanded only later much later too late did i understand how small she was to herself the baby nobody picked up the uncarried child still inside her but that day she was born up on the shoulders of her own outrage and she said it's the first time i've had to order a book in a false name i tried to explain what i'd hoped to do i am an ambitious writer i don't see the point of being anything no not anything at all if you have no ambition for it and 1985 wasn't the day of the memoir and in any case i wasn't writing one i was trying to get away from the received experience from the received idea that women always write about experience that compass of what they know while men write wide and bold the big canvas the experiment with form henry james misunderstood jane austen's comment that she wrote on four inches of ivory the tiny observant minutiae eye and much the same was said of emily dickinson and virginia woolf and those things made me angry in any case why could they not be experience and experiment why could they not be the observed and the imagined why should a woman be limited by anything or anybody why should a woman not be ambitious for literature ambitious for herself mrs winterson was having none of it she knew full well that writers were sex crazed bohemians who broke the rules and didn't go out to work and books have been forbidden in our house and so for me to have written one and had it published and had it win a prize and be standing in a phone box giving her a lecture on literature a polemic on feminism bb bb the pips more money in the slot and i'm thinking as a voice goes in and out like the sea why aren't you proud of me the pips more money in the slot and i'm locked out and i'm sitting on the doorstep again it's really cold and i've got a newspaper under my bum and i'm huddled in my duffle coat a woman comes by i know her she gives me a bag of chips she knows what my mother's like inside our house the light's on dad's on the night shift so she can go to bed but she won't sleep she'll read the bible all night and when dad comes home he'll say nothing and she'll say nothing and will act like it's normal to leave your kid outside all night and normal never to sleep with your husband and normal to have two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dust to draw we're still on the phone in our phone booths she tells me that my success is from the devil keeper of the wrong crib she confronts me with the fact that i've used my own name in the novel if it's a story why is the main character called giannette why i can't remember a time when i wasn't setting my story against hers it was my survival from the very beginning adopted children are self-invented because we have to be there's an absence a void a question mark at the very beginning of our lives a crucial part of our story is gone and violently like a bomb in the womb the baby explodes into an unknown world only knowable through some kind of a story and of course that's how we all live it's the narrative of our lives but adoption drops you into the story after it has started it's like reading a book with the first few pages missing it's like arriving after curtain up and the feeling that something is missing never ever leaves you and it can't and it shouldn't because something is missing that isn't of its nature negative the missing part the missing past can be an opening as well as a void it can be an entry as well as an exit it is the fossil record the imprint of another life and although you can never have that life your fingers trace the space where it might have been and your fingers learn a kind of braille there are markings here raised like welts read them read the hurt rewrite them rewrite the hurt it's why i am a writer i don't say decided to be or became it was not an act of will or even a conscious choice to avoid the narrow mesh of mrs winterson's story i had to be able to tell my own part fact part fiction is what life is and it's always a cover story i wrote my way out she said but it's not true truth and this from a woman who explained the flash dash of mice activity in the kitchen as ectoplasm there was a terrorist house in akron in lancashire in england and we call those houses two up two down two rooms downstairs two rooms upstairs and three of us lived together in that house for 16 years i told my version faithful and invented accurate and misremembered shuffled in time i told myself as a hero like any shipwreck story and it was a shipwreck a me thrown on the coastline of humankind and finding it not altogether human and rarely kind and i suppose that the saddest thing for me thinking about the cover version that is orange is is that i wrote a story i could live with the other one was too painful i could not survive it i'm often asked in a tick box kind of a way what is true and what is not true in oranges did i work in a funeral parlor did i drive an ice cream van did we have a gospel tent yeah we did did mrs winterson build her own cb radio did she really stun tomcats with a catapult i can't answer these questions i can say that there is a character in oranges called testifying elsie who looks after the little jeanette and acts as a soft wall against the hurtling force of mother i wrote her in because i couldn't bear to leave her out i wrote her in because i really wished it had been that way when you are a solitary child you find an imaginary friend but there was no elsie and there was no one like elsie things were much lonelier than that i spent most of my school years sitting on the railings outside the school gates in the breaks i was not a popular or a likeable child too spiky too angry too intense too odd and the church going didn't encourage school friends and school situations always pick out the misfit although embroidering the summer is ended and we are not yet saved on my gym bag made me easy to spot adoption is outside you act out what it feels like to be the one who doesn't belong and you act it out by trying to do to others what has been done to you it's impossible to believe that anyone loves you for yourself i never believe that my parents love me i tried to love them but it didn't work it's taken me a long time to learn how to love both the giving and the receiving i've written about love obsessively forensically and i know it knew it as the highest value i loved god of course in the early days and god loved me and that was something and i loved animals and nature and poetry people were the problem how do you love another person how do you trust another person to love you i had no idea i thought that love was loss why is the measure of love loss that was the opening line of a novel of mine written on the body i was stalking love trapping love losing love longing for love truth for anybody is a very complex thing and for a writer what you leave out says as much as the things that you include what lies beyond the margin of the text mrs winterson objected to what i had put in but it seemed to me that what i had left out was the story's silent twin there are so many things that we can't say because they are too painful and we hope that the things that we can say will soothe the rest or appease it in some way stories are compensatory the world is unfair unjust unknowable out of control when we tell a story we exercise control but in such a way as to leave a gap an opening it's a version but never the final one and perhaps we hope that the silences will be heard by someone else and the story can continue can be retold when we write we offer the silence as much as the story words are the part of silence that can be spoken i believe in fiction and in the power of stories because that way we speak in tongues we are not silenced all of us when in deep trauma we find that we hesitate we stammer there are long pauses in our speech the thing is stuck we get our language back through the language of others we can turn to the poem we can open the book somebody's been there for us and deep dived the words i needed words because unhappy families are conspiracies of silence the one who breaks the silence is never forgiven he or she has to learn to forgive him or herself god is forgiveness or so that particular story goes but in our house god was old testament and there was no forgiveness without a great deal of sacrifice mrs winterson was unhappy and we had to be unhappy with her she was waiting for the apocalypse her favorite song was god has blotted them out i might sing that for you later now you have to wait her favorite song was god has blotted them out which was meant to be about sins but really was about anyone who'd ever annoyed her which was everybody she just didn't like anyone and she didn't like life life was a burden to be carried as far as the grave and then dumped life was a veil of tears life was a pre-death experience it's good that is now i thought about myself every day mrs winterson prayed lord let me die and this was hard on me and my dad her own mother had been a genteel woman who'd married a seductive thug giving him her money and watched him womanize it away for a while when i was about three until i was about five we had to live with my grandad so that mrs winterson could nurse her mother who was dying of throat cancer although mrs w was deeply religious she believed in spirits and it made her very angry that granddad's new girlfriend as well as being an aging barmaid with dyed blonde hair was a medium who held seances in our very own front room after the seances my mother complained that the house was full of men in uniform from the war when i went into the kitchen to get at the corned beef sandwiches i was told not to eat until the dead had gone and this could take several hours which is hard when you were four i took to wandering up and down the streets asking for food and mrs winterson came after me and that was the first time i heard this dark story of the devil and the wrong crib in the crib next to me in the orphanage there'd been a little boy called paul he may be here tonight paul was my ghostly brother because his saint itself was always invoked when i was naughty paul would never have dropped his new doll into the pond we didn't go near the surreal possibilities of paul having been given a doll in the first place paul would not have filled his poodle pajama case with tomatoes so that he could perform a stomach operation with blood-like squish paul would not have hidden grandad's gas mask for some reason grandad still had his gas mask from the war and i loved it paul would not have turned up at a nice birthday party to which he had not been invited wearing granddad's gas mask if they had taken paul instead of me it would have been different better i was supposed to be a pal like she had been to her mother and then her mother died and she shut herself up in her grief and i shot myself up in the ladder because i had learned how to use the little key that opened the tins of corned beef i have a memory true or not true the memory is surrounded by roses which is odd because it is a violent and upsetting memory my grandad was a keen gardener and he particularly loved roses i liked finding him shirt sleeves rolled up wearing a knitted waistcoat and spraying the blooms with water from a polished can with a piston pressure valve he liked me in an odd sort of a way and he disliked my mother and she hated him not in an angry way but with a toxic submissive resentment i'm wearing my favorite outfit a cowboy suit and a fringed hat my small body is slung from side to side with cap gun coats a woman comes into the garden and granda tells me go inside find my mother who's making her usual pile of sandwiches i run in mrs winterson takes off her apron and goes to answer the door i'm peeping from down the hallway there's an argument between the two women a terrible argument that i can't understand something fierce and frightening like animal fear mrs winterson slams the door and leans on it for a second i creep out from my peeping place she turns round there i am in my cowboy outfit was that my mom mrs winterson hits me and the blue knocks me back and then she runs upstairs i go out into the garden my grandad's spraying the roses he ignores me there's nobody there that's the beginning i'm going to read some more in a minute [Music] so you get the picture it's going to be well worth the outlay the book's divided really into two parts because it's about the overwhelming presence of one mother mrs winterson and the overwhelming absence of another mother the biological mother the bioma and in the middle there's just one page which is called intermission where i tell you that i'm going to miss out 25 years because i can it's irrelevant to this story and i didn't want to sidetrack the story and perhaps more importantly i wanted to lay these narratives side by side the one in the distant past and the one that came hard up against my present um butted into it intruded on it in such a way as to dislodge and destabilize me um from the safe landing place that i thought was my life and when that happens when these these great beasts come in and take us these enormous things we know that we have to respond in some way we can't turn away we can't shut the door we can't hide you know how we endlessly micromanage our lives i mean we're getting more and more obsessive partly because we're in slavery to the diary and the clock and the calendar but the important things the big things can never be managed they always happen by chance do they not somebody dies we didn't expect it we meet somebody a stranger we fall in love somebody leaves us somebody comes somebody goes the job changes we change you know all of those big things always sweep us off our feet we're not ready we're never ready all we can do is prepare inside and hope that there'll be something about us our character ourself that enables us to meet whatever it is that life throws at us in these strange and random ways there's no certainty there's no insurance there's certainly no safety net but there is ourselves and therefore how we build ourselves how we shore up ourselves how we educate ourselves in the wider sense is what's so important and that's why we get back to these ideas about art and how it is that art will support us rather than supplanters in our lives it's not something that doesn't want you to be the master of yourself it wants to keep you in your own home in your own house in your own self and that's very important i think especially when these moments of dislodgement come along which is how it felt to me when i found my adoption papers which i'd never found before and it was a great shock and i found this these ancient bits of paperwork you know anything that happened before the digital age now looks like it comes out of the ark doesn't it i mean typewriting you know who knew i mean it always looked ancient and yellowy and everybody's got all the mistakes and there's bits of two picks and you think how did they manage but they all did and of course i found these bits of paper um handwritten tight written old forms you know no xeroxing all done in duplicates with carbon paper um it looked like another world it looked like something pre-arc anti-deluvian and it was but it was my life that was in that strange lost world and i had to go and look for it and i kept a journal of what was happening through that detective story and then turned back to winterson world as well but one of the things that i believe or that i've realized as i've got older is that our inner lives don't work according to the clock or the calendar or to any receive chronology that's not how it is you know our psychic processes are indifferent to time when we remember things we don't remember them in sequence not in chronological sequence at all we remember according to the emotional significance of the memory and where it lies in our own collection of memories about ourselves and others and that can be random and it can shift and it changes over time too and you know there's been a lot of talking especially with the memoir about what's a false memory we know what's true in a documentary self sense you know what what's received what can we believe but it's really important not to get caught in those black and white binary reductions of how we are human beings are very complex and you know the hot topic of neuroscience this summer is really going to be about how memory itself is an act of narrative that you don't go back to a fixed point in time which exists preserved in in a pristine state like a fossil that you can discover and pull out of the ground not so at all the memory itself was an act of narrative forces you to reconsider the whole picture which is perhaps what we're meant to do and certainly that's not about false memory but you know how it is sometimes you remember something that you think you know quite well but because of where you are in your own situation and you a part of it will reappear or stand out from all the other things you think i never thought of it like that before why this why now and then that causes us to look at everything differently and sometimes it's a huge shock but it's obviously something that we need to confront that our psychic processes bring up for us again and again and i think literature really helps us with this and i'm very pleased that neuroscience has finally got the point i mean obviously they've never read any proost you know sometimes it takes science a long time to catch up and then they put little wires on your head and they say see the bits the brain light up so we know we're right um but for all of us you know who've read deeply or whether you've been to the opera the concert or the theater thought about life understood life from the inside out rather from the outside in we know that this is how we remember and that we are not subject in our deepest selves either to the clock or the calendar or to that chronology that we live by you know we need to be in the 24 7 world but not all of the time we also need to protect and privilege those spaces in ourselves but are really not figured by the hours and the minutes and crucially are not up for sale the time that belongs to us and when we say that we don't have any time that's the most tragic thing of all because time is all that we've got and not very much of it and if it's always for sale or if it's always hired out somewhere um whether it's some false god that we think we have to serve you know or to the craziness of the modern world then we're losing that special place that we have with our loved ones with our friends with our family with ourselves and i think that matters because to me everything on this planet is about relationship and when things go wrong it's when those relationships collapse or break down in some way whether it's our relationship with the planet and with nature with each other with money itself with time you know all of it is about connection we don't live in solitary towers we live in a web one with another and that i think needs to be recognized and felt and understood so that's why i wrote the book as i did and although i think you'll find it quite an easy read um it's it's a little bit of a crafty book because it doesn't move through time taking absolutely no notice of it as a chronological event appropriately enough i will now read from chapter 8 which is called the apocalypse in case you were wondering when it's going to happen mrs winterson was not a welcoming woman if anybody knocked at the door she ran down the lobby and shoved the poker through the letterbox i'll leave you to fix that image in your mind and i suggest that you don't try it at home alone not everything tonight can be an interactive experience part of the problem was that we had no bathroom and she was ashamed of this not many people we knew did have bathrooms but i was not allowed to have friends around from school in case they wanted to use the toilet and then they would have to go outside and then they would discover that we had no bathroom in fact that was the least of it a bigger challenge for unbelievers than a drafty encounter with the outside lou was what was waiting for them when they got there we were not allowed books in our house but we lived in a world of print and mrs winterson wrote out exhortations and stuck them all over the house and under my coat peg there was a sign that said think of god not the dog and over the gas oven on a loaf wrapper she'd written man shall not live by bread alone but in the outside loo directly in front of you as you went through the door there was a placard and those who stood up read linger not at the lord's business and those who sat down read he shall melt thy bowels like wax that's from the book of deuteronomy in case you want to look it up later this was wishful thinking my mother was having trouble with her bowels it was something to do with the loaf of white slice that we couldn't live by when i went to school my mother put quotes from the scriptures in my hockey boots and at meal times there was a little scroll from the promise box by each of our plates and a promise box is a box with bible texts rolled up inside it like the jokes that you get in christmas crackers but serious and the little rolls stand on end and you close your eyes and you pick one out and it can be comforting let not your hearts be troubled neither let them be afraid or it can be frightening the sins of the father shall be visited on the children but cheery or depressing it was all reading and reading was what i wanted to do fed words and shod with them words became clues piece by piece i knew they would lead me somewhere else the only time that mrs winterson liked to answer the door was when she knew that the more moms were coming round and then she waited in the lobby and before they dropped the knocker she'd flung open the door waving her bible and warning them of eternal damnation and this was confusing for the mormons because they thought that they were in charge of eternal damnation but mrs winterson was a better candidate for the job now and again if she was in a sociable frame of mind and there was a knock at the door she left the poker alone and she sent me out the back to run up the alley and peep round the corner down the street to see who was there i ran back with the news but by this time discouraged by no response the visitor would be halfway down the street so i'd have to run and fetch them back if my mother wanted to see them and then she'd pretend to be surprised and pleased i didn't care it gave me a chance to go upstairs and read a forbidden book i think that mrs winterson had been well read at one time because when i was about seven she read jane eyre to me and this was deemed suitable because it has a minister in it sinjin rivers who's keen on missionary work mrs winterson read out loud turning the pages there is the terrible fire at thornfield hall and mr rochester goes blind but in the version that mrs winterson read jane doesn't bother about her now sightless paramore she marries sinjin rivers and they go off together to work in the mission field it was only when i finally read jane eyre for myself that i found out what my mother had done and she did it so well turning the pages and inventing the text next temporary in the style of charlotte bronte the book disappeared as i got older perhaps she didn't want me to read it for myself i assumed that she hid books the way that she hid everything else including her heart but our house was small and i searched it were we endlessly ransacking the house the two of us looking for evidence of one another i think we were she because i was fatally unknown to her and she was afraid of me and me because i had no idea what was missing but felt the missingness of the missing we circled each other wary abandoned full of longing we came close but not close enough and then we pushed each other away forever i did find a book but i wish i hadn't it was hidden in a tall boy under a pile of flannels and it was a 1950s sex manual called how to please your husband this terrifying term might have explained why mrs winterson didn't have children it had black and white diagrams and lists and tips and most of the positions looked like adverts for a children's game of physical torment called twister as i pondered the horrors of heterosexuality i'll read that again as i pondered the horrors of heterosexuality i realized that i need not feel sorry for either of my parents my mother hadn't read it well perhaps she'd opened it once and realized the extent of the task and put it away the book was flat pristine intact and so whatever my father had had to do without and to really don't think they ever had sex he hadn't had to spend his nights with mrs w with one hand on his penis and the other holding the manual while she followed the instructions i remember her telling me soon after they were married that my father had come home dead drunk and she locked him out of the bedroom he broken down the door and she thrown her wedding ring into the gutter he went out to find it she got on the night bus to the nearest town and this was offered as an illustration of how jesus improves a marriage the only sex education that my mother ever gave me was the injunction never let a boy touch you down there i had no idea what she meant she seemed to be referring to my knees would it have been better if i'd fallen for a boy and not a girl probably not i had entered her own fearful place the terror of the body the resolution of her marriage her own mother's humiliation at her father's coarseness and womanizing sex disgusted her and now when she looked at me she saw sex thank you [Music] i'm coming back it's good isn't it i'll tell you where the title comes from because mrs winterson is a shakespearean villain so she has all the best lines as they always do in shakespeare and when i was told that i had to leave home it was because i had indeed fallen in love with another woman and they tried an exorcism they tried everything but i was stubborn holding on to love because it seemed valuable to me and i've always been reckless in love perhaps too much so um but because i knew that love was the highest value i couldn't simply give it up and say no it doesn't matter and it seemed to me that if god is love and if god was the god that i'd been taught that i've been told about surely that god wasn't going to be in a terminal decline because i was kissing a girl seemed unlikely even then i knew there was a flaw in this argument about an omnipotent god who would want to micromanage the bedroom because i thought if you've got a whole universe to play with i mean why would you i mean would you you wouldn't would you you'd be having such a wonderful time just creating planets and messing around with dark matter you wouldn't be thinking jesus there's a girl kissing a girl but mrs winston didn't think like that neither did the pentecostal church that i was brought up in so when it came to the day of reckoning um she said to me either you give up the girl or you leave home and i was 16 i had nowhere to go i was about to go and do my a-levels so i was frightened but what would you do in such a circumstance that's right so i packed my bag and i was setting off in down the gloomy hallway where the poker spent so much of its time flying up and down as if by magic and she called me back and she said jeanette and i thought perhaps we're going to have a conversation perhaps for the first time we'll be on the same side of the glass screen that has always parted us and i thought she'll hear me you know we'll see each other we'll speak she said tell me why you're doing this because she took everything personally and i said i can't tell you but i can say that it makes me happy and there was a long pause and she nodded which she didn't often do she's usually shook her head but she nodded and then she said why be happy when you could be normal and she was a violent philosopher but to an intense and introspective child like me perhaps that was a good line to leave on because i spent really i suppose for the next 35 years trying to work out whether that was a real question whether it was a true binary like black white good even male female i thought happy normal normal happy you know are these opposites um if i've got one can i not have the other you know it's a real conundrum i've spent a long time worrying about this and i'm picking him until finally i answered the question satisfaction for myself in so much as it is a question um but that's what i took away with me um then it's a sentence that has always stayed to be worked out i guess everybody here has got something like that but you know that you'll spend your whole the whole of your life or at least half of it trying to settle for yourself and that's what i did and the second half the book is much darker um i'm not going to say it has a happy ending the last line is i have no idea what happens next but it doesn't have a false ending and i think it has a very optimistic ending i do find bioma we do meet and the story is there unfolded for you and what happens but what i've understood from my reading and i've read a lot is that there are only three possible endings once you've got rid of the hollywood falsity of a happy ending and those three endings are revenge tragedy and forgiveness there is nothing else pick any story you like it'll entertain you on the way home it's better than doing the business with the poker or trying to reinvent the sex manual just think about those endings and revenge and tragedy usually go together they almost always do and it's only forgiveness which allows the story to move on from that last page from that finality into a new possibility and you know it's not easy to forgive you remember nelson mandela said that you can forgive or you can forget but you can't do both and so it is because forgiveness is itself an act of memory you have to remember either what you've done or what's been done to you there's nothing sentimental about it's nothing soft or easy about it it's a huge thing because it's confronting what has happened whatever it is and being able not only to see the situation understand it but somehow to pass through it the way light does through a solid object and come out on the other side and that allows everything and i suppose that has been the biggest lesson of my life um to allow that forgiveness to take place you know there's a wonderful poem by yates which i love you won't mind me reciting so which he says this is wbh the irish poet and he says when such as i cast out remorse so greater sweetness flows into the breast that we must dance and we must sing for we are blessed by everything and everything we look upon is blessed and look at what the verbs are doing because you know with those the verbs tell you everything they're the active part of the sentence you know the verbs really power it if the verb's wrong the sentence is wrong and look at the first one he says when such as i cast out what does that verb like what does it tell us i mean you can cast out demons that's that's physical it's violent it's something which takes energy takes effort to cast something out there's that sense of necromancy there there's you know there is the spell the enchantment in it and also the energy the effort in the verb when such as i cast out remorse and then look at the next verb so greater sweetness flows into the breast and that's a lovely conjunction of language there you know within the first two lines of the poem that show us how this actually operates practically in the self poems are practical um there's nothing ponzi or farting very fairy about a poem you know a poem is a practical thing you know it's solid like a piece of furniture maybe more so um and it tells us how to do things you know they're good they're good methods for living by they're short you can memorize them when such as i cast out remorse so greater sweetness flows into the breast that we must dance and we must sing for we are blessed by everything and everything we look upon is blessed it's lovely isn't it we're doing poetry night now we give up on this oh the song go yeah i think i'll do that in a minute for you because there's two you see mrs winterson's favorite song as you know was god has blotted them out mine um being of an annoyingly cheerful temperament was cheer up his saints of god i love that don't say the saints of god being told to cheer up you know some peterson pulchio but that's the best of the low church evangelism you know there's something very homely about it cheer up your saints of god um there's nothing to worry about it's a terrible thing i mean it's real rumpety-tum stuff you know it's not as good as he ate but god has blotted them out goes like this god has blotted them out god has blotted them out i haven't finished yet my enemies mocked and scoffed at me he blotted them out and set me free god has plotted them out god has blotted them out [Music] [Applause] [Music] she was longing for the apocalypse well everybody would get their jew i mean we we used to rehearse the apocalypse you know some people are fire drills well not us um because we were living in end time so because mrs winterson was a lot older i mean then she'd been a young woman in the war my father was in the way he was in the d-day landings and mrs winterson was there at home doing her thing she was a home guard she looked great in the uniform anyway she had a war cupboard that she put tins in but of course she never talked them out she's always putting things in but never taking them out so even when i even in the 60s and 70s it was full of really frightening stuff like dried egg you know and cherries in vinegar they used to do awful things like that and powder powder is everything you know that is amazing what you could get into a powder and you know this was long before nasa had invented freeze-dried you know it was all in lancashire in mrs winterson's cupboard if you didn't need the space mission um so the idea was that we would get all the tins out of the cupboard and take them under the stairs when the apocalypse happened and then wait for jesus to liberate us but it wouldn't be jesus himself she explained he would send an angel and i used to worry about where the wings would fit because the space under the stairs was really narrow there's only enough room for the brush and me and mrs winterson you know oh and the shoe polish too yeah that's true i've forgotten that so and the tins so when the drill came because what she'd do is she'd say you're lying in your bed and you think that everything is normal i never thought that not once so you're lying in your bed and you think that everything is normal and she said and then there'll be a trumpet when she used to play for me that i would know what trump it sounded like you know um so i was really okay with the brass section of the orchestra there'll be a trumpet so then what when you hear the trumpet just get out of bed as you are said you don't need to bring anything just come down in your pajamas go straight into the cupboard under the stairs and i'll follow you with the tins and so all right so we did it so it would go dark dad was usually at work i go to i pretend to be asleep and mrs winston had a little bugle so we don't say anything and then she go you know the blue going off i think it's the last trump get up run downstairs you know it would all be lit by candles because of course we'd have had a power cut by then i mean you know she did it all authentically you didn't have to use your imagination no to go down in the pitch door a few candles into the cupboard you know where there was a candle as well which was really dangerous because we could just burn the whole house down and then we practice but we wouldn't actually open a tin because they were too precious so we just imagine what it would be like to eat our way through the tins i don't know why i'm telling you all do you think i'm getting over sherry i think we're coming to the end um but i will be outside um signing books and i hope you'll come and talk to me i hope the queue won't be too long and thank you for coming tonight for being in this this intimate shared space good night thank you [Applause] thank you thank you thank you very much everybody up there and up there even there at the back thank you very much [Music] [Applause] thank you [Applause] thank you [Music] you're very generous here down under they're not like this in england you know they'd be embarrassed [Music] cheer up your saints of god i'll see you later bye you

Channel: Sydney Writers' Festival

Views: 16,731

Rating: 4.9477124 out of 5

Keywords: Sydney Opera House (Opera House), Sydney, Sydney Writers' Festival (Recurring Event), jeanette winterson, oranges are not the only fruit

Id: iV9X9itPAn8

Length: 60min 36sec (3636 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 07 2012