Jeanette Winterson Has No Idea What Happens Next

Jeanette Winterson burst onto the literary scene in 1985 with the publication of her début novel, “Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit,” a fictional “retelling” of her childhood in a working-class Pentecostal family. Winterson’s parents, who adopted her, raised her to be a missionary, a charismatic mouthpiece for a God she feared. The prodigious Mrs. Winterson beat and berated her, attempted to wall her off from all culture save the Bible, and then, upon discovering that her daughter was sleeping with a woman, cast her out of the house at sixteen. Winterson supported herself as a mortician’s assistant, ice-cream-van driver, and aide in a psychiatric hospital while studying for her A-levels. After earning a degree in English from St. Catherine’s College, in Oxford, she moved to London, where she took on more odd jobs. (In 1997, she disclosed that one of those jobs was not sex work, exactly, but servicing married women in hotel rooms; the housewives expressed their thanks in Le Creuset saucepans.)

“Oranges,” which was followed by the experimental novels “The Passion,” in 1987, and “Sexing the Cherry,” in 1989, made Winterson a literary celebrity, a nervy, young, female alternative to Ian McEwan and Martin Amis. Critics praised her pyrotechnic language, her lyrical attention to desire and emotion, her imagination, her exuberance. The journalist Angela Lambert wrote that the experimental early books maintained a “high standard of captivating originality, using words so that they played and shimmered like dolphins in a sunlit sea.” But she took issue with Winterson’s “condescending, even intimidating tone” on the ground that “few critics . . . care to be patronised by a working class lesbian from Accrington.”

At times, Winterson seemed ill-equipped to handle her own meteoric rise. She blustered: during a late-night television interview, she proclaimed herself the natural heir to Virginia Woolf. Asked by the press to choose a “book of the year,” she chose her own. Asked to name her favorite living author, she named herself. She told a newspaper that her rhapsodic novel “Written on the Body” had been inspired by her own affair with her married agent—outing the woman in question. Reviewers began to accuse her of involution, pretension, and self-entrancement. “She cannot resist making metaphors out of molehills,” the Independent declared. Her writing “has itself become steadily more impaired by her self-regard and insularity,” the Spectator chided. In the Times Book Review, William H. Pritchard suggested that “her recent public pronouncements raise the possibility that, like the now wholly faded Dame Edith Sitwell (who did her bit for magic poetic realism), Ms. Winterson may turn out to belong more to the history of publicity than of literature.”

Winterson moved from the city to the country. She gathered her friends, including the crime writer Ruth Rendell, the literary agent Philippa Brewster, and the actor Vicky Licorish, around her. She kept writing—historical fiction, a Shakespeare adaptation, a renovation of the “Frankenstein” plot, children’s literature, and essays about art and culture. “The PowerBook,” which came out in 2000, spliced Winterson’s perennial themes—language, gender, adultery—with curiosity about the dawn of the Internet. Two decades later, she would extend this inquiry still further with an essay collection, “12 Bytes: How A.I. Will Change the Way We Live and Love.” Winterson made what seems in retrospect like her official comeback in 2011, publishing a memoir revisiting her childhood, “Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?,” to readers’ delight. If “Oranges” transfigured her painful upbringing, the new book stared unblinkingly at it, submitting yet more alterations to the record. Winterson’s latest book, “Night Side of the River,” a collection of ghost stories, is out in time for Halloween.

On Zoom, Winterson, who has been teaching creative writing at the University of Manchester since 2012, appeared in a glorious square of sunlight and foliage that turned out to be a window. She was in her house in the Gloucestershire countryside. She wore a snow-white button-down shirt, on which the top several buttons were rakishly unbuttoned. I found her to be kind, generous, open, and very funny, with a refreshing lack of interest in being anyone other than herself. Our conversation has been condensed and edited.

Why ghost stories?

Two years ago, Substack, the platform, asked me to write a story every week for a month, which is hard. But they paid well, and, as they wanted me for November, I said, “Let’s start on Halloween, shall we? And let’s do ghosts.” And, as I was writing them, I thought, You know, I’m really enjoying this, and maybe I will make this into a proper book.

The beauty of choosing a theme for a collection of short stories is that you get a very pleasing shape. With shorter forms, because there isn’t time to develop very far with character, you have to be smart about the insights that you can offer, the small details that show who people are. It’s good discipline, too, because short stories have to deliver. They need a beginning, middle, and end.

The other thing I wanted to do is to separate the supernatural from horror, because lately all of that has become conflated. My favorite ghost story is “A Christmas Carol.” That story’s joyful openheartedness, its munificence, its beneficence just delight me. I mean, there’s this thing that writers are meant to be miserable and suffer, but no—you can have a good time. Dickens is playing with the idea that a ghost will intervene on your behalf and stop you from walking under that bus. It’s a very seductive idea, isn’t it?

I loved that about the collection. “No Ghost Ghost Story” is a sweet story that imagines ghosts as loved ones who keep looking out for us. Other stories are more high gothic, with villainous ghosts and garments that try to strangle you. And then there are creepy futuristic stories that seem almost like warnings. Was there a particular flavor of ghost story that you especially liked writing?

I was intrigued by what A.I. might do with our notions of being haunted, and I was playing around with the idea of the metaverse. If we did inhabit a credible digital space, an alternative, non-biological world where we went around as our avatars, we’d be starting to negotiate how to avoid the hard boundary of death, which is all humans really want to do. In the metaverse, there’s no reason why you should die, if your loved ones wished to keep your digital twin going.

In [the story] “Ghost in the Machine,” I wanted to play with the idea that you might start to have a real relationship with an entity that is a program but is much more interesting than anybody you know in your biological world. Where would that logically take you? It would logically take you toward your own death.

It was striking to me how A.I. converged with the ghostly in your stories, because to me they seem very different. Ghosts are aligned with the past, whereas A.I. feels related to the future.

I was brought up in a very religious house. Religion is so deeply sunk into the self for me that it cannot be separated. And so I’m intrigued that the religious notion of the biological self as a temporary condition is now finding a new home in science and tech. They’re saying “Well, yeah, [the biological self] is a temporary condition that you’ll be able to sidestep through the creation of a digital self.” That’s the promise of technology, and it’s also the promise of religion, the first disrupter of death. And it amuses me to see the separation from the biological self that religion has always promised and foretold coming into vogue, coming into fashion, through the agency of Big Tech.

Has your relationship to ghosts changed over time? Your upbringing was so devout.

Well, this is the trouble. Of course I believed in ghosts growing up because in my deeply religious household we expected to continue after death. But what was strange in our household was that I lived with two generations of traumatized adults. They wouldn’t have called themselves that because nobody “in the war” ever did. It was only much later in life I realized that my grandparents and my parents had been in separate wars.