Jeanette Winterson

Working variously as an ice-cream van driver, a funeral parlor make-up artist and a domestic worker in a mental institution, she studied at Accrington College of Further Education and then went on to obtain her B.A. in English from St. Catherine’s College at Oxford in 1981.

INTERVIEWER

Why did you leave London?

JEANETTE WINTERSON

I didn’t want to live there anymore. It became untenable for me in all sorts of ways. After having two very bad experiences with the press, both with Written on the Body and Art and Lies, I just didn’t want to be in the fishbowl. I thought, I want to get away from here because it’s not going to do me or my work any good to stay. So I went and hid myself in the woods.

But that doesn’t mean that I don’t have a very powerful relationship with this city. I have just bought myself a mad, derelict, fallen-down Georgian house in one of the older parts of London, because I need to return here, and, like Dickens, I love to walk the streets in the night and see what is happening, see what’s going on. So in me there is that tension between needing the space and peace and also wanting to be where humanity is concentrated at its worst and its best.

Paris Review https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1188/jeanette-winterson-the-art-of-fiction-no-150-jeanette-winterson