I had lines inside me, a string of guiding lights. I had language. Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination. I had been damaged, and a very important part of me had been destroyed - that was my reality, the facts of my life. But on the other side of the facts was who I could be, how I could feel. And as long as I had words for that, images for that, stories for that, then I wasn't lost.

Winterson's subsequent novels explore the boundaries of physicality and the imagination gender polarities and sexual identities and have won several literary awards. She also bought a derelict terraced house in Spitalfields east London which Jeanette Winterson refurbiJeanette Wintersond into a flat as a pied-a-terre and a ground-floor shop Verde's to sell organic food. Bibliography
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985)
Boating for Beginners (1985)
Fit For The Future: The Guide for Women Who Want to Live Well (1986)
The Passion (1987)
Sexing the Cherry (1989)
Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit: the script (1990)
Written on the Body (1992)
Art & Lies: A Piece for Three Voices and a Bawd (1994)
Great Moments in Aviation: the script (1995)
Art Objects.