Sunday book pick: ‘Sexing the Cherry’ by Jeanette Winterson is an utterly mad novel

“I am a woman going mad. I am a woman hallucinating. I imagine I am huge, raw, a giant.”

Jeanette Winterson seems to care very little about rules and conventions in the matters of writing fiction. If there’s one thing she takes seriously, it’s being utterly mad. Mad in the true sense of the word, yes, and also being unpredictable, zany, and moody with what she’s creating. In her own confession, time is circular and novels harbour a strange desire to compress all of it into a few hundred pages. A novelist is a slave to this desire. Her fifth book Sexing the Cherry, published in 1989, is “all about what happens in between what happens.” In the Introduction, Winterson hands you a guide on how to read the novel. Pretty soon you realise it is of no help at all.

In the beginning

In the beginning, the novel hurls you back to London of the 1660s. Dog Woman, a woman of monstrous proportions, finds a male orphaned baby in the “grey waters” on the Thames. As her name suggests, she has thirty dogs to her name who she takes to Hyde Park for runs and to show off, and breeds them for sustenance and fun. The discovery...

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