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Amazon.co.uk: What inspired you to write The.PowerBook ?

Jeanette Winterson: New technology has grown more and more fascinating to me. And because I've felt for 40 years that this is the century I've wanted to be in. I feel pleased the 21st century is here--it's exciting, it feels new, it feels different--and I wanted to reflect that in the structure of the book. I wanted to see if you could use both the e-mail formula and the whole Web formula, not just as a structure but as a metaphor for the larger picture in the book. I think writers have to be on the cutting edge of their own time. I don't mean that they need to reflect this in a mirrorism or reportage but they have to act as warning systems and conduits for what is really happening and what is significant. And one of the things that distresses me is there is a lot of talk at the moment, particularly among writers, from the whole cultural pundits, that this is the end of culture, that civilisation, built up since the Greeks, is all about to collapse--because of Apple Mac!

This is crazy. We are privileged to be living in a period of enormous transition. Inventions like the telephone and television are really legacies of the 19th-century technology--they are concrete and understandable in a very direct way. But the Web is something different. It's altering the way we think, it's altering the way do business. Scary, but to me it's also very exciting, as a writer, to be right in there--using it, grappling with it, trying to push it forward. Because to me, if you're not involved, if you say no, then you're on the outside--you are no longer a spokesman for your own time, you're just somebody who's criticising it. I don't see interfacing between art and technology as disturbing and a rupture but beneficial and positive.

Amazon.co.uk: Would you consider going truly interactive?

Winterson: I don't know how it will actually work but I'm going to find out because I will be part of the process. I think what you have got to preserve and maintain is the idea of a vision and a voice. That's how the best work gets done. Democracy can't change that. Audience participation won't change that.

I talk about reading as not being a passive act and why I like the sense that the reader is involved with the writer at every stage, because that's when you get the most out of the book.

Amazon.co.uk: Has your novel "lost the plot"?

Winterson: It never had one. I don't do a beginning, middle and an end. I'm much more concerned with imaginative space--getting underneath the concepts we make about the world to get to a better sense of reality. Art's a fabrication but a fabrication through which we try and tell a better truth because the world is only an approximate world--another world in our emotional psyche--like the iceberg beneath the waves. For so many people, this world is only the tip of it. We're always living in our heads, thinking about other things, which have nothing to do with the world we're supposedly living in. It's really trying to bring together those realities, with what is for me the very superficial reality of the everyday world, "which is called the real world" and those other realities of the individual, which to me seem to be more significant.

I'm also concerned with getting away from linear time. Of course, we live by the clock--we have to--otherwise the whole thing would break down. And yet, we know ourselves when we think about things that are important to us--inner time takes over, so events over 10 years come together in our minds--an emotional connection that has nothing to do with the time in between. That's the way we structure our own idea of ourselves and our memory. This is often not sequential and has no relation to the calendar. This simply consists of heightened moments. We're often jumping from peak to peak--and I try to do this in my work--to get at truths that can be flattened out if we simply follow the day to day routine. Plot in the traditional sense isn't interesting to me but the stories are.

Amazon.co.uk: The one story that will stand out in many reader's minds is the cross-dressing tulip boy. How did that come about?

Winterson: It's so ridiculous, but again it's fun. You start these things and wonder where this will take you. And you just chase after it. And then, of course, you have to add some structure--make sure it's coherent. But the pleasure is in the outrageousness of the idea. And I suppose because it pokes fun at all those potent phallic myths.

The.PowerBook is packed with stories. Oranges itself is a construct of separate stories. I've done it all the way through. I like those stories in themselves to be completely coherent so you can stand up and tell them at any one time. As long as I can do that, I'm satisfied. I don't want to make a kind of soap-opera world that mimics the one we live in--there's enough of that. To my mind what I'm doing is much truer to the way we think and feel. What I think is artificial is that we go through life running a linear narrative--coherent with a beginning, a middle and an end. I don't know anyone who lives like that. And yet we call it realism.

Amazon.co.uk:

Your writing often focuses on questions of gender and desire. Can writing ever be gender-free?

Winterson: For me gender is not entirely a construct, but it's only the beginning of the story. And it's certainly not the end. It's where we start from, it's where the potential is but it's what we do with it that's interesting.

When I wrote Written on the Body , I had no idea it was going to cause such controversy here. It didn't happen anywhere else. Take the translation issue where language is so gendered. In France they got around it by continually altering the gender, which I thought interesting and left the reader with more freedom to decide.

Amazon.co.uk: You've been quoted as saying that "It is impossible for a woman in a heterosexual relationship to give herself wholeheartedly to her art; it just gets in the way." Impossible?

Winterson:

I was probably overstating the case for effect. Sure, there are women who will find a solution; I have not been able to manage it. When I think of the great women writers of the 18th and 19th centuries--Austen, Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte--all were unmarried. And I still haven't seen much evidence that it has been done--that's the scary thing.

Amazon.co.uk: Is there anybody you'd rather didn't read your books?

Winterson: No, but I'm always a little surprised when Daily Telegraph readers do. I travel home on the train, in the first-class compartment, with 15-odd very fat guys in stripy suits reading the Daily Telegraph and looking at me, with my copy of the Big Issue , like I shouldn't be there, waiting for the guard to fling me out. And I ask myself, what would happen if one of these guys read one of my books? He'd probably write it off as "complete rubbish". I'm concerned by how much you invest in your view of the world. I find complacent, powerful types of men who don't realise anything exists beyond the world they control, disturbing. I'd rather people with an unwillingness to have their view altered--those people who are never willing to admit that they don't have the answers--didn't read my books .

Amazon.co.uk:

In the new introduction to Oranges , you wished for "the knack of knowing when to stop". How will you judge that?

Winterson: When you start parodying your own work, you're finished--spinning out the same thing. I won't name names for fear of libel. I need to be moving on, exploring. If I can't do that, I'll stop. Shakespeare didn't write anything for the last 12 years of his life. The.PowerBook is the end of a cycle--consisting of seven books. I feel it intuitively--I know it's the end of something and the beginning of something new, but I don't know what. It might be over now but I'm the one who is going to find out first.

Amazon.co.uk: You take a lot of flak for your writing. How do you respond to your detractors?

Winterson:

Some people are magnets for this sort of thing--Martin Amis is and so am I. The highest compliment the British can pay is to say something is natural. Unfortunately, that doesn't happen in Art. Anyone who shows that up pays dearly. Amis's work is highly artificial and constructed, and I'm interested in the primacy of Art, which is seen as elitist and high brow. We attract the criticism: "Who do they think they are?" The buzz word of the moment is "the People". Art isn't democratic, not everyone can do it and it's not a benefit to everyone. That makes some people cross. People who are uninterested in Art are quite prepared to tell you what Art is and isn't. In other areas, you would expect the person to have some grasp of your subject matter, to know what they're talking about, but not so with Art. If it's one of "the people", we're supposed to back down and say there must be something wrong with the product. I'm not prepared to dislike something unless I can know what it is I don't like about it--blaming the object is usually a failure in oneself. I need to know why? People like what's familiar to them (ie a painting by Constable or a Dickens' adaptation). What they're comfortable with they call Art; what's uncomfortable they call not-art. That cannot be the last word; it is only the start of the debate. That's why I was so pleased when the Dome failed. Something that was meant for "the people" has been rejected by the British public, and ended up bankrupting all of us. And yet, the Tate, which was supposed to be elitist, has been a huge success.

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