WORDS ROXY BOURDILLON
Jeanette Winterson’s 1985 debut, Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, was famously inspired by her experience growing up gay in a strict Pentecostal community. Since then, she has continued to boldly explore themes of sexuality and gender in her writing. Her latest offering, Frankissstein: A Love Story, takes on these topics with a compelling combination of humour and hard science. It is a novel for right now, a timely reanimation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, leaping expertly between early 19th century Romanticism and our modern age of artiicial intelligence and gender luidity. When I meet the renowned writer at a book signing in Bloomsbury, I ind her funny, formidable and utterly riveting.