RaveAmerica MagazineFrances Wilson, a fine stylist herself, as well as an enterprising researcher and venturesome critic, has written a provocative new study of Spark’s life packed with the kind of details, puzzles and wordplay that Spark revered ... Because Wilson is such an ambitious and lively writer, committed to digging deep, Electric Spark is engaging throughout. The force and clarity of her arguments, however debatable, do her subject the literary justice she deserves.
Jeanette Winterson
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.
