The newest piece at The Quarterly Conversation is Lauren Elkin’s essay on Jeanette Winterson. The piece starts out with Elkin outlining Winterson’s ideas about how autobiographical fiction is or isn’t:

The problem of autobiography will always be there, Winterson acknowledges; this problem is one, she writes, “that each artist solves for themselves.” And trying to parse what is lived from what is invented is not only “irrelevant,” it is “impossible”: “We cannot work backwards from the finished text into its raw material.” So, then, the artist must become a “translator,” must learn “to pass into her own language the languages gathered from stones, from birds, from dreams, from the body, from the material world, from sex, from death, from love.” Making literature is an activity of transformation, turning the raw material of authorial experience into readerly experience.

And from there we get into how Winterson “retells” stories–her own reality included–in her works:

But if the point is to break through the hum and speak of the “life of the mind and the soul’s journey,” why tell these stories? What exactly are the mythic qualities of storytelling? How does retelling these stories break through the daily cacophony of news and gossip and images and soundbites? I would suggest that the answer to these questions lies in the potential danger wrapped up in the heart of the story—the devastating results we find again and again of loving too much, and seeking too far. Winterson goes back to these stories to find the danger in them, and to harness it in order to mount her attacks: against the stasis of being read autobiographically; against the linear temporality of a patriarchal narrative; as a form of feminist historiography, reinserting women into the march of history.