Written on the Bed Sheets of Paper

Written on the Body, by Jeanette Winterson, is the book that opened me up as a reader and as a writer. It is also the book that helped me come out of the closet.

It was assigned in a class my first year of college, and it found me at the perfect moment in my life. Written on the Body is a beautifully composed novel that is written from outside of the confines of gender lines. The narrator is a genderless voice that ushers the reader though the treacherous terrain of a highly passionate extramarital affair.

The beginning of the book is an extended poetic musing on love and loss and the intense passion that is doomed to die because it burns so hot. Every time I read it, I remember the way I felt when I first creased the back of the spine and read the opening pages. The words seemed to express everything the angsty, lovelorn, and confused 18-year-old version of me was feeling. Each sentence seemed to cut so deep into my chest I thought my heart might fall out. And, in a way, it did.

I remember the sense of agony and satisfaction that I felt reading those words. It was as if this person had ripped open the pages of my journals, read between the lines, and wrote them back to me in an anonymous letter that smelled of distant perfume. It was as if this voice on the page had seen my face and showed it to me in a beautifully ornate two-way mirror. I thought I had been looking only at myself, but it turns out there was someone else there all along.

Up until that point I had been writing short stories that I did not fully understand. I did not know where they came from, or why some of the characters seemed like strangers to me. I remember one particular story that I kept rewriting. Over and over I would go through and change all of the “he”s to “she”s and then back again. It wasn’t until after I read Written on the Body that I was able to make sense of the things I was writing and the emotions I was feeling. I was able to take the “he”s and “she”s out of my writing all together and recognize that sometimes the distinction of one over the other is a matter of little consequence.