After failing to find such a woman, he realizes that true perfection exists when a person is able to balance the different parts of her character, strengths and flaws alike. She imagines a story about a prince who searches for the perfect woman.

Jeanette thinks about perfection in a different way. Man was perfect, the pastor says, until he ate from the Tree of Knowledge and was cast out of the Garden of Eden. The first disagreement concerns a sermon she hears about perfection. However, before long, Jeanette begins to find reasons to disagree with the teachings of her mother's church. In fact, she takes her daughter to the movies as a reward. When Jeanette's teachers write her mother a letter complaining that Jeanette's stories about hell scare the other children, her mother is proud of Jeanette. As a commentary on her mother's closed-minded attitude, Jeanette remarks that her mother behaves as if 'oranges are the only fruit'-hence the book's title.Īt school, Jeanette feels like an outcast because of her religious fixations and the influence of her mother. On one of her infrequent visits, her mother brings Jeanette a bag of oranges. The operation is successful, but as Jeanette recovers, her mother barely visits her in the hospital. Miss Jewsbury, a considerably more progressive member of Jeanette's congregation, realizes instantly that Jeanette has gone deaf and takes her to a hospital for an operation. Her mother, incorrectly assuming that her daughter is in a state of 'rapture,' doesn't realize she is deaf. Despite her untraditional upbringing, Jeanette says she always felt 'special.' Jeanette recalls the time when she lost her hearing. She believes, as her mother insists, that she will become a missionary.

Until now, Jeanette has had no friends or acquaintances outside her mother's church. Jeanette goes through a drastic transition at age seven when she begins receiving a secular education, going to school away from home for the first time. The first chapter, for example, is called 'Genesis.' As the story begins, seven-year-old Jeanette has been home-schooled by her zealous and rigorously religious adoptive mother who chose to adopt a child because she wished to train a 'servant of God' without having sex or being sinful in any way. The book's eight chapters are named after the first eight sections of the Old Testament. In 1990, Winterson adapted the book into a BAFTA award-winning television film. In her debut novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1985), an LGBT-themed coming-of-age novel, the English author Jeanette Winterson relates the semi-autobiographical tale of her upbringing as a fundamentalist Pentecostal Christian who experiences a sexual awakening when she discovers she is a lesbian.

Oranges are not