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.
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