The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story – of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you – and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.
Interpretation
Adoption introduces complexities in identity and belonging, as one enters a life story without the full background.
This quote reflects on the challenges faced by adopted individuals who must navigate their identities in a world where their beginnings are often shrouded in mystery. Jeanette Winterson eloquently illustrates the sense of incompleteness and longing that accompanies adoption, likening it to starting a book without the initial context, which impacts one's understanding of self and life narrative.
In practice
In a speech about embracing diversity, I might quote Winterson to illustrate the importance of understanding individual backgrounds.
What is remembered is not a deed in stone but a metaphor. Meta = above. Pheren = to carry. That which is carried above the literalness of life. A way of thinking that avoids the problems of gravity. The word won't let me down. The single word that can release me from all that unuttered weight.
Reading things that are relevant to the facts of your life is of limited value. The facts are, after all, only the facts, and the yearning passionate part of you will not be met there. That is why reading ourselves as a fiction as well as fact is so liberating. The wider we read the freer we become.
I have a list of titles that I leave at the [library] desk, because they are bound to be written some day, and it's best to be ahead of the queue.
Woolf wanted to say dangerous things in Orlando but she did not want to say them in the missionary position.
In that house, you will find my heart. You must break in, Henri, and get it back for me.' Was she mad? We had been talking figuratively. Her heart was in her body like mine. I tried to explain this to her, but she took my hand and put it against her chest. Feel for yourself.
History is a string full of knots, the best you can do is admire it, and maybe tie it up a bit more. History is a hammock for swinging and a game for playing.
I hurt easy, I just don't show it. You can hurt someone and not even know it.
I've wrecked and ravaged half my life in the pursuit of women, and I suffer the pangs of about seventeen regrets -- the seventeen who got away.
Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.
You have to see and smell and feel the circumstances of people to really understand them.
Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty, but my goodness, doesn't it help?
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