PositiveThe Washington PostThe first half of this coming-of-age story is arresting and suspenseful, even though we know perfectly well that Jeanette will remain a lesbian, despite her mother’s best efforts, and will become a bestselling and influential writer. Winterson has a wonderfully off-kilter sense of humor about her dark past, but she is a loopy writer in the structural sense, too, preoccupied with the nonlinear nature of time. She swoops between present and past, between narrative and contemplation, with grace and economy ... Because [the second half] extends into the present, this section does not have — perhaps cannot have — the freeing distance of irony, of deadpan delivery, that the earlier part so effectively deploys. Winterson’s account of recovery and reunion with her birth mother is certainly moving — only a Mrs. W. would not be shaken — but the memoir’s second half sometimes seems plain and unWintersonesque in the telling.
