2015: The Year of Reading Women discussion

ORANGES ARE NOT THE ONLY FRUIT was written during the winter of 1983 and the spring of 1984. I was 24. At that time I was sharing two rooms and a hip bath with the actress Vicky Licorish. She had no money, I had no money, we could not afford the luxury of a separate whites wash and so were thankful of the fashion for coloured knickers which allowed those garments most closely associated with our self-esteem, not to be grey. Dinginess is death to a writer. Filth, discomfort, hunger, cold, trauma and drama, don’t matter a bit. I have had plenty of each and they have only encouraged me, but dinginess, the damp small confines of the mediocre and the gradual corrosion of beauty and light, the compromising and the settling; these things make good work impossible. When Keats was depressed he put on a clean shirt. When Radclyffe Hall was oppressed she ordered new sets of silk underwear from Jermyn Street. Byron, as we all know, allowed only the softest, purest and whitest next to his heroic skin, and I am a great admirer of Byron. So it seemed to me in those days of no money, no job, no prospects and a determined dinginess creeping up from the lower floors of our rooming house, that there had to be a centre, a talisman, a fetish even, that secured order where there seemed to be none; dressing for dinner every night in the jungle, or the men who polished their boots to a hard shine before wading the waters of Gallipoli. To do something large and to do it well demands such observances, personal and peculiar, laughable as they often are, because they stave off that dinginess of soul that says that everything is small and grubby and nothing is really worth the effort.
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Oranges is an experimental novel: its interests are anti-linear. It offers a complicated narrative structure disguised as a simple one, it employs a very large vocabulary and a beguilingly straight-forward syntax. This means that you can read in spirals. As a shape, the spiral is fluid and allows infinite movement. But is it movement backwards or forwards? Is it height or depth? Draw several, each drifting into each and all this will be clear. A spiral narrative suits me very well and I have continued to use it and to improve upon it in The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. I really don’t see the point of reading in straight lines. We don’t think like that and we don’t live like that. Our mental processes are closer to a maze than a motorway, every turning yields another turning, not symmetrical, not obvious. Not chaos either. A sophisticated mathematical equation made harder to unravel because X and Y have different values on different days.
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In 1985 Oranges was published thanks to the initiative of Philippa Brewster and her newly established Pandora Press. Sadly, Pandora has never had independent funding and so it has been bought and sold and bought at the whim of its backers. In 1990 it became the property of Rupert Murdoch. How ironic that Oranges, thanks to a series of big business bungles, should fall into the hands of a self-confessed born-again multi-millionaire. I know that in an increasingly corporate world it’s getting harder and harder to make an ethical decision, either about the brand of baked beans you buy or the House with which you publish. The lines of choice are not clear-cut and compromise is usually inevitable. For myself I have a personal code of practice and stick to it as closely as possible. I decided that I could not leave Oranges at Pandora. ‘Dear Mr Murdoch, please do not buy Vintage.’