Welcome to Litsy!

#TBRTarot Last book for January and I just realized my choice doesn‘t quite fit the prompt. But this is the book I was meant to read. My review of Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit says I wanted more of Jeanette‘s story and this book is it. I needed this book when I was a young teen, not that I would have understood it then. As Jeanette is the same age I am she was surviving her life to write this book published is 2011. 5 🌟

"A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn‘t a hiding place. It is a finding place."

The title of this book is something Winterson‘s mother actually said to her! She was a strict Pentecostal Evangelist and not exactly what you‘d call accepting or open-minded. Such a good memoir.

#Judgemental #MayMoms
@Eggs @Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

^^TIME. “Life + art … is a boxing match with time.

P. 156 Whenever I write a book, one sentence forms in my mind, like a sandbar above the waterline. They are like the texts written up on the walls when we all lived at 200 Water Street; exhortations, maxims, lighthouse signals flashed out as memory and warning.

The Passion: ‘I‘m telling you stories. Trust me.‘
Written on the Body: ‘Why is the measure of love loss?‘

I remember devouring Winterson‘s novels in younger days, the sensuality & ferocity, the imaginative voice. Memoir—though I don‘t know she calls it that—on her childhood near Manchester in “Wintersonworld,” her adoptive parents (“Dad” & “Mrs. Winterson”), her search for her biological mother. The raw pain & bitterness=hard to take sometimes, but tempered with humor & realization of adoptive mother‘s depression, fatalism. Secrecy. Reading=hope. 2011

#LovePrevails Day 23: Strawberry mojito and lemon macarons (plus a great book) definitely qualify as some much needed #SelfLove or to be more apt #SelfCare. 🥰💕📚🧚🏻‍♀️

A tough life needs a tough language - and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers - a language powerful enough to say how it is.

It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.

If I could give advice on this it would be to not read it too soon after Oranges. I know this is brilliant but the over lap if the too was disconcerting.

This week's hopeful #weeklyforcast is a bit digital.
Hoping to pick up The Name Of The Rose on the #bookspin Starting the week with the tagged book. And have many digital ARCs and a library book to get through on the trusty Kobo. Elijah Cunningham's to finish then the new The Heiress about Miss Anne de Bourgh! So excited for that last one.

A masterfull autobiography: raw and vulnerable, profound and humorous. It really makes you feel honoured to have been let in on her most personal relationships, while still maintaining an entertaining and skilled prose and never loses its relatability despite the highly specific circumstances retold in the book. I really wanna read her childrens books next!

On discovering the public library as a child that is forbidden to read fiction at home:

“The Library held all the Eng lit classics, and quite a few surprises like Gertrude Stein. I had no idea of what to read or in what order, so I just started alphabetically. Thank God her last name was Austen...”

Exemplary use of ending a sentence with . . . 😍 #austenites

“When my mother was angry with me, which was often, she said, ‘The Devil led us to the wrong crib.‘”

Well that‘s off to a good start... #FirstLineFridays

The first part I found a little confuse and hart to see where she was going but once she got there it was a mesmerizing read. So many parts that you want to mark and reread later. And despite having had the feeling that you probably should have read oranges first, it‘s not the story about the author of oranges are not the only fruits. It‘s the story about a woman trying to heal a wound so deep that there might not be a cure for it at all.

A book is a magic carpet that flies you off elsewhere. A book is a door. You open it. You step through. Do you come back?

#7Days7Books
Day 1
We present here seven books that will remain in our minds, because they touched us so much, changed us. No further comment!
#QueerBooks #LGBTQBooks #LGBTQ

Love this cover 😍 This is my #happyinthetitle for #magnificentmarch day 3.

@Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks @OriginalCyn620

Both really profound and really messy.

It‘s both about Oranges and sequel to it, the rest of Winterson‘s life as a successful novelist, her complete breakdown, etc. Tons a side notes of quotable wisdom, like how every thought has an emotion and you can‘t separate them. I adore Winterson‘s spastic mindset, even if I personally don‘t know what to do with all she has to offer.

“She was everything Nabokov loathed.”

That‘s quite an compliment. 🙂

"I panic when my feelings are not clear. It is like staring into a muddy pond, and rather than wait until an ecosystem develops to clear the water, I prefer to drain the pond." (p 228)

I have a different story than Winterson's, but I relate to this strongly.

I wasn't sure for a while, but I've decided I like this memoir. It's not emotionally simple. Winterson writes about her complicated and frequently traumatic relationship with her adoptive mother, but she doesn't wallow in that trauma and neither does she brush it aside. She lets it be complex, lets it be ugly, and owns it all the same. It's not a perfect book, and she does some odd things with other people's stories, but overall I like it.

"Whenever I am troubled," said the librarian, "I think about the Dewey decimal system."

"Then what happens?" asked the junior, rather overawed.

"Then I understand that trouble is just something that has been filed in the wrong place."

"Reading yourself as a fiction as well as a fact is the only way to keep the narrative open---the only way to stop the story running away under its own momentum, often towards an ending no one wants."

(In reference to Woolf's Orlando and Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, both of which blur the line between fiction and fact.)

Here's something I found interesting: On p. 130 of the hardcover edition of the tagged book (top image), Winterson retells a scene from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. I hadn't remembered this scene as she presented it, so I looked it up. The bottom image is from p. 173 of the paperback Alice B. Toklas that I own. I like Winterson's version better, but I wonder what prompted her to change/embellish Gertrude Stein's words?

I'm really not in the mood for memoir lately. Still working through this one (and it's not bad at all), it's just taking a while. Might bail on Another Bullshit Night in Suck City, though.

I decided to read this after having read “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit”. I really enjoyed reading this as a follow-up and more in-depth look at what Jeanette changed for@the factionalized account of her childhood. I would definitely recommend reading this if you‘ve read Oranges, but be sure to read Oranges first. #NFNov

I haven‘t read this, but it has been on my tbr for so long. In my profession I see clearly, that “#EverybodysHappyNowadays” is no where near the truth. People got issues, trauma, thoughts and emotions they don‘t know how to deal with, and from what I have heard, that‘s exactly what Winterson deals with in this memoir

#RedRoseSeptember

#RedRoseSeptember Another book from my #TBR 🙃Writer Jeanette Winterson is best known for her uniquely original & strange novels but it‘s her sad childhood that‘s most unbelievable. I‘m told this is a difficult but important book to get through. Explaining mental illness, early childhood trauma and the process of recovery. #EverybodysHappyNowadays

Finally getting to do some reading. This passage was a punch to the gut. I wasn‘t sure about this book...but now I‘m hooked.

#KindleDailyDeal $1.99 today❣️❣️❣️so that‘s another book I bought @TrishB 🤪🥳

#childhood
#quote
#jeanettewinterson
#loner
#heal
#memoir
#findinghome
#autobiography
#love

My next read! From one of my favorite authors. 2012.
#jeanettewinterson
#childhood
#memoir
#autobiography
#britishauthor

I had a sense of myself as a haunted house. I never knew when the invisible thing would strike - and it was like a blow, a kind of winding in the chest or stomach. When I felt it I would cry out at the force of it.

Sometimes I lay curled up on the floor. Sometimes I kneeled and gripped a piece of furniture.

This is one moment...know that another...

Hold on, hold on, hold on.

"And it wasn't the end of books rescuing me. If poetry was a rope, then books themselves were rafts. At my most precarious I balanced on a book, and the books rafted me over the tides of feelings that left me soaked and shattered.

Feelings. I didn't want to feel."

"Male pride, I think the teacher called it. I thought it was the stupidest thing I had ever heard; a flat earth theory of social relations."

I love this book.

"'He hates what women become,' said the wildman. 'That's different. He loves women until they become what they become.'"

Yeah fuck you too mate.

I realised my behavior wasn't ideal but my mother believed I was demon possessed and the headmistress was in mourning for Scotland. It was hard to be normal.

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.

#Memoir #ReadingWomenMonth @thereadingwomen

„Creativity is on the side of health — it isn‘t the thing that drives us mad; it is the capacity in us that tries to save us from madness.“

#sandstorm #GetMovin
Cos she's on a beach, and her life's been quite stormy.....cut me some slack, I travelled to Northampton to watch Oldham get relegated yesterday and drank twice my own body weight in wine and vodka to drown my considerable sorrows and I didn't get up til 6pm and I'm in the pub retoxing. @Cinfhen @eanderson

Book and kitchen bathed in sunlight. 😂

My London book haul so far, including my very first Folio edition. 😍 #foliofreaks #icavedineventually #alltheprettybooks

Jaenette is such a terribly nice person. Just stopping by to chat to guests in the audience. I wanna be her when i grow up!

Loved this a lot. It‘s only my second Winterson, having just read Christmas Days last month; I can‘t wait to read more and more. Her writing is the perfect mix of funny, frank, poignant, irreverent, challenging, and philosophical - so good. ❤️ (My second completed book of #24in48 - the stopwatch is at 10 hours and 48 minutes at present. :)

#spirit #quotsyjan18 @TK-421

#LoveNeedsNoDisguise
Unless your mum's a mad Christian fundamentalist. Then it might do. A little bit.
#NuYear @Cinfhen @TrishB

Jeanette‘s writing is exquisite and her nonlinear structure helps tell her life‘s story, imitating how we tell ourselves stories in real life. She was 25 when she wrote the novelization of her young life, ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT. But this older and more mature Jeanette gives us insights about her life she couldn‘t when she was younger. This #memoir blew me away. Now I need to go buy my own copy so I can underline the crap out of it. ❤️ - K⠀