Jeanette Winterson on Grief, Being “Post-Heterosexual”

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“Susie (Orbach) calls herself post-heterosexual. I like that description because I like the idea of people being fluid in their sexuality. I don’t for instance consider myself to be a lesbian. I want to be beyond those descriptive constraints.”

“Over the years I’ve had five letters from people saying that what I wrote stopped them killing themselves.”

“A lot of people … sidestep the pain, by taking pills or moving on or whatever. But I didn’t think any of that would work. The pain would come back again and again if I didn’t live in the grief. And the thought of it coming back was awful, unbearable. I’d rather have died.”

— A few selections from a pretty brilliant interview with Jeanette Winterson at The Guardian

Seth Fischer's writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Best Sex Writing 2013, The Rumpus, Pank, Guernica, Gertrude, and elsewhere. He teaches and tutors at Antioch University Los Angeles and Writing Workshops Los Angeles. Find more writing from him at www.seth-fischer.com, or reach him at seth.fischer (at) gmail.com or @sethfischer. More from this author →