Her mother is horrified and disgusted and brings in the pastor to conduct an exorcism of Jeanette. When Jeanette falls in love with a girl named Melanie and starts an affair, its discovery leads to upheaval in all parts of her life.
While a male pastor was recognized as the true leader, he was often off on mission trips and so the daily business of running the church and winning converts was left to a group of women led by Jeanette’s mother. While Jeanette didn’t fit in among her peers, she did seem to feel some connection to her mother’s church and as she matured, Jeanette also began to preach and lead. She notes that, “This tendency towards the exotic has brought me many problems, just as it did for William Blake.” (The real Jeanette had this on her gym bag.) Despite repeated attempts to fit in and win prizes, Jeanette comes up short: an Easter egg diorama of Brunhilda confronting her father, a scene from “A Street Car Named Desire” in pipe cleaners, an embroidered cushion cover featuring Bette Davis in “Now Voyager,” all failed to win the expected accolades. In the novel, Jeanette creates a sampler for her sewing class that reads: THE SUMMER IS ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED. Her discussions of hell and redemption seem to have been off-putting to other students and teachers. Jeanette was an outsider, too, and writes of her school days with some humor. Her mother was a leader in their church, spoke with conviction and authority, and was respected by the members of their circle even if she didn’t have many friends to speak of. Novel Jeanette seems not to have had a problem with this. Both Jeanettes were adopted, and it seems that both Jeanettes’ mothers wished to groom their daughters to become missionaries. The main character, also named Jeanette, tells her story in retrospect and focuses on her adolescent and early teen years, which seem to have occurred in the early 1970s. In this case, the author struggles to reconcile religion, family and sexual preference. As with my previous review, The Golden Notebook, an underlying theme is alienation, a breaking up of the whole person and an attempt at putting it all back together again. Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is Jeanette Winterson’s autobiographical novel about her upbringing by an evangelical Christian mother in England and her coming out as a lesbian.
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