The Story Archive

Written on the Body

Jeanette Winterson · 1992 CE · Novel · English · Contemporary

A narrator whose sex and name are never given has left a trail of affairs, mostly with married women, and treats the whole business with practised irony until Louise, married to a cancer specialist, breaks it off. Her illness turns the flippancy into an anatomy: a catalogue of the beloved's cells, bones and skin, set down system by system. Winterson withholds every marker that would settle who is speaking, which is the experiment the book exists to run.

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