Written on the Body

by Jeanette Winterson

Like all Winterson novels (Sexing the Cherry, The Passion), this ambiguous love story is a philosophical meditation, this time on the body: the body as physical phenomenon, and the body as repository of our emotions and souls. The object is a married woman named Louise, and the narrator is her lover, gender undeclared, who reveals the topography of desire for readers.

Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn’t know that Louise would have reading hands. She has translated me into her own book.

INCLUSION CRITERIA

A main character (unnamed, gender unspecified) can be interpreted as attracted to people of multiple genders, or the story can be interpreted in many ways due to the ambiguity of gender.