Later on in this chapter she is 14 years old, but we cannot know if this is the age at which she discovered she was adopted. It is the reason why 'I have never since played cards': a comment that characteristically gestures at a trauma that is never represented. It is not really narrated, just said in passing. In the fourth chapter, 'Numbers', she mentions 'the day I discovered my adoption papers while searching for a pack of playing cards'. In a memoir, we would surely feel dissatisfied by the lack of attention given to the narrator's discovery that her extraordinary mother, dominant in the novel as in her life, was not her biological mother. In life, we presume, the author's father did occasionally utter some words, and communicated enough to earn what, in the fictionalised version, is his daughter's rueful affection. 'Poor Dad, he was never quite good enough.' In a memoir, this would be strange - doubtless crying out for psychoanalytic explanation.

In a novel, the fact that the protagonist's father never quite enters a room, and certainly never speaks, seems designed and appropriate. An autobiography must explain a novel can make a narrative out of gaps. We are licensed to identify author and protagonist - yet this is a novel. The author's name is otherwise used by teachers ('Jeanette, we think you may be having problems at school') or elders of her church, though not by her own mother. We might recall the familiarity when, a few years and chapters later, Miss Jewsbury seduces the sinful Jeanette.

We hear it for the first time on the lips of Miss Jewsbury ('Don't be fanciful Jeanette'), a fellow member of her Christian sect. In Winterson's book, though her surname is never used, she shares a Christian name (for once, this culture-specific phrase is appropriate) with the author. That is to say, the character was renamed 'Jess'. I s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit fiction or autobiography? TV adapters worry more than novelists about whether their fictions might seem true, and in the BBC dramatisation of Jeanette Winterson's novel its young protagonist was named 'Jess'.

Oranges are not the only fruit book