RaveThe Globe and MailWinterson\'s memoir of an abusive upbringing can at times give the sense of a therapeutic wound-draining exercise, a complaint session with primary benefits for its author. But she takes it further, talking about how literature can be a lifeline to isolated and abused children ... The memoir\'s bleak recounting would threaten to sink the reader at times if not for Winterson\'s sharp sense of humour ... Winterson deftly alerts us, in a distinctly unacademic way, to the personal, historical and social underpinnings of literature. What great forces lead a 25-year-old working-class woman from a cotton-mill town, rejected by her family and pronounced a sinner, to write a bestselling novel? As Winterson\'s oeuvre of ideas is evolving still, we can only hope for more memoir writing from her.