Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit is considered to be a classic “coming-of-age” novel however, it is known to basically be a memoir. The book is about a girl, who incidentally is lesbian, growing up in a strict religious household in a small English town. It is, as somebody wrote, British author Jeanette Winterson’s ‘Künstlerroman.’*
Half a lifetime later Winterson kind of rewrote it in, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? These to books are inseparably connected as they are in fact two versions of the same story. The youthful one with more fairytales narrated in an experimental way (written at 26 years of age); the second, with more philosophical and political ponderings, the work of the same storyteller in her mid-50s.
* Künstlerroman (German; plural -ane) means a narrative about an artist’s growth to maturity.
Anna Bidoonism 