Jeanette Winterson in conversation with Matt Haig

One of the things that most excited me about becoming Booktrust's Writer in Residence is that, towards the end of the residency, I'd have the chance to interview a writer I admire and who'd had an impact on me in some way, personally or creatively.

For me, I knew instantly who I would choose. Jeanette Winterson has had a profound effect on my life in various ways. Short of being granted an interview with Emily Dickinson, I can't think of someone I'd rather address questions to. When I was a teenager she helped me love language, when I was depressed in my twenties her words helped me connect with the world again, and then - when I was starting out as a novelist nearly a decade ago - I wanted her to read my debut novel. She read it, endorsed it and helped me get a publisher. It is not overstating it to say I owe a deeper love of language and my career to her. And I know that she is one of those writers who has changed many other lives too. It was an honour to be able to ask her some questions…

As a teenager I read Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit after school, in the library at Newark-on-Trent. I had realised I loved stories before this point, but it was reading Oranges... that I first understood how much I loved language, and the ideas it can contain. One of the things I love about your writing is the way it can contain incredibly powerful and complex ideas in deceptively simple words. For instance, this massively sank into me: 'I have a theory that every time you make an important choice, the part of you left behind continues the other life you could have had.' It is a great bittersweet idea, that actually helped me, because it reminds us that regret is the consequence of being weak in our decisions. Your work is full of things that have helped me and I'm sure countless others. Do you see literature's job  to be something more than just entertainment and reflection, but also instruction? (Can books save us?)

Yes, books can and do save us. Have you read A M HOMES This Book Will Save Your Life?  

It is one of the best contemporary novels. Yes, books can and do save us. I educated myself in the Accrington Public Library reading English Literature in Prose A-Z. It starts well - Austen, Brontes, Conrad, Dickens, Eliot. I discovered that the great writers were not remote - they were in Accrington. I was brought up as an evangelical - and I believe in the power of the word - I believe in saving souls. But for that you have to believe that humans have a soul. Look, if you accept that life has an inside as well as an outside, then what is there that supports the inside? The soul of life? Everything in our society is about the outside; your status, looks, spending, sex, shopping, money, etc.  Art and culture are about the inside - sure there's the cash and the media attention that comes via art and artists, but that's all froth. Sit with a picture or a book or listen to a piece of music or go to the theatre, whatever, and you are feeding your soul. Read a book and you are giving yourself an inner life. Reading is a rendezvous with your soul.

I love that! Now, when I think of your writing the word that comes to mind is passion. You even wrote a book called The Passion. In that book you write: 'Do it from the heart or not at all.' You can feel the force of passion in every sentence you write. It sets you apart from many other contemporary writers, whose writing is often characterised by irony and an almost clinical detachment. Do you see passion as a prerequisite to good writing?

To me, writing is a lie-detector, and it starts by detecting the lies we tell to ourselves about ourselves.All writers defend the kind of work they do themselves. I want to see the fingermarks, the way it was made, what it cost you. I want the sweat on the stone where you used all your strength to hammer out the shape. I struggle with ironic detachment - the clever observances and unemotional judgements. I don't like superior sniggering. I never wanted to write middle class English novels. I know that we write from what we are - however much we pretend to objectivity - anyway, there is no such thing. Everything passes through the I that I am - (the You that You are) - which is why being conscious is so important - very often what we call our objectivity is just our unconscious prejudice or fear, so well hidden that we imagine we are saying something real. Knowing your own darkness (to paraphrase George Herbert) goes some way to overcoming self-deception. I don't want to be a smug self-regarding person. To me, writing is a lie-detector, and it starts by detecting the lies we tell to ourselves about ourselves.

I always wanted to to write with my whole body not just my head. I try to write from the whole messy mass of who I am - and that means writing myself multiple, jumbled, chaotic, male, female, young, old, past and future, the lot. But it is still me,  I noticed when I started out and used myself as a fictional character called Jeanette, that this was assumed to be autobiography (if Kundera or Henry Miller or Roth does it, it's playful, clever, knowing meta-fiction). But I know that life is both cover-story and cover-version. We invent and we re-invent. We are fictions as well as facts. If you understand yourself as a story you can change the story. Learning to read is learning to read yourself as a narrative. It is simple and obvious but it changes everything.

Right, next question. (I'm scared.) Apologies in advance, but my favourite anecdote about you is the one when, just as you were starting out, you doorstepped a reviewer and asked them to explain a bad review. I know you wouldn't do such a thing now, but do you still care about what reviewers (and others) think of your books? Or do you reach such a stature, or place of confidence that those things don't matter any more?

It is astonishing how often I have corrected this and that it makes no difference. What I hate about the media is that once a lie is in there it never gets straightened out because journalists who are too lazy to engage with your work will spend hours trawling the cuttings. So once more - it wasn't a review. I really believe that people must be allowed to review your work as they wish - good or bad, stupid or smart. You publish a book and it is in the public domain. Let people say what they want. Be philosophical, be sure of yourself. You have written the book you set out to write. That should be enough.

The incident you describe was a pretend interview written by a journalist to whom I had not given an interview. She wrote a 'profile' as though it were an interview, including close descriptions of my home where she had been invited as a friend. I felt used and angry and I went round to see her to say so. She then went into print (again!) moaning about her dinner party being disrupted. How was I to know she was having a bloody dinner party?!  It was a low point for me. But at that time whatever I said was turned into something I didn't say. So I had stopped giving interviews but got stitched up anyway. Yikes what a life. It makes me laugh now because when you look back at these things they don't matter at all.

But what is the point of being a writer if you're not trouble?It's true too that my life as a writer close- tracks the huge and disruptive change in what it means to be a writer. From being private rather reclusive persons, writers became highly-paid media monkeys whose lives were all about sex and money and gossip. We were great copy because we had no PR people fielding questions, no manager sitting beside us. It was bonkers. Also, getting published at 25 and winning a big prize means you grow up in public. I was outspoken, a woman, a working class woman, political, gay, sexually dangerous, (men don't like young women seducing their wives). And I wanted to be a really good writer. And I said so. (if you are a woman ambition = pushy. Confidence = arrogance.) I was a challenge to the status quo and I was trouble. But what is the point of being a writer if you're not trouble?

Ha! I'm going to pin that last sentence to my wall. You are now a Professor of Creative Writing at Manchester University. What can be taught, and what can't? Can anyone be a writer, with the right training?

I am delighted to be doing the Manchester job for a couple of years. It is a good strong rigorous course, as much about reading as about writing, and I really enjoy talking to the students. Creativity is part of being human. I am sure that much of our mental illness and distress and social unrest comes out of our failure as a society to make space for natural creativity. Creativity is cooking a delicious meal from fresh ingredients, it's making a dress, it's designing a garden, it's building a shed, it's making a swing for your kids, it's painting a picture, picking up the guitar. All that William Morris, Arts and Crafts stuff was  a recoil from the collective nervous breakdown that was the industrial revolution. By which I mean, we are not machines.

And we are not robots whose only purpose is to mind the machines. We are inventive, problem solving, life delighting, meaning seeking creatures. We all need outlets for our creativity. That doesn't mean we are all going to be the artists of our generation - there are different doses and dilutions of creativity - it does me we need expression. You can teach someone how to express themselves clearly, simply, without cliché and with depth. That is a result. It improves their lives, no question. Does it make them Shakespeare? No.

Love is a continuing theme in your work. Why?

Everything in this life is about relationship - with one another, with the planet, with ourselves.When I was a child I read by accident the full text of the Grail Legends - Morte d'Arthur. No other text except for the Bible has had such a deep effect on my imagination. I knew I would never find the Grail - which to me meant total unconditional love - but I thought it was worth the pilgrimage of a lifetime. I think adoption leaves deep wounds that don't heal. They need not heal for you to be healed. That's something I have written about closely in Why Be Happy. In 1992 I wrote a novel called Written on the Body. The opening line is Why is the measure of love loss? It is a good line; lots of girls have it tattooed on their bodies. I thought love was loss. I thought that love, however glorious and necessary, was unstable and risky and destructive - never to be depended upon. It has taken me half a lifetime to learn that love can be as reliable as the sun - the daily rising of love.

Everything in this life is about relationship - with one another, with the planet, with ourselves. To be in relation to is to learn how to love. There is stupid lie that hatred is somehow objective but love is blind. It is hate that is blind. I still read the Bible and it is always worth reading 1 Corinthians 13 - it is the passage that begins, though I speak with the tongues of men and angels but have not love I am a noisy gong, a clanging cymbal. Good notes for a writer.

I said, what is the point of being a writer if you're not trouble, I say too, what is the point of being a writer if you can't reveal something of the heart?

With over a third of homes in this country having no books in them, do you worry about the future of the book?

Well, what would happen if we went back to an oral/visual tradition that was spoken word and icon based? Previously that was stained glass, paintings, church, storytelling. What matters to me most is that we protect our imaginations, our creativity, our culture, our civilisation. I don't want to be in a new Dark Age. The threat is wider than the loss of books. We're talking about life having an inside as well as an outside again, aren't we? My view is that we should protect what we love.

Well, what would happen if we went back to an oral/visual tradition that was spoken word and icon based? Right now if you want to protect the book and what the book stands for, don't buy on Amazon, do support your local bookshop. Use libraries. Be seen to be reading in public spaces. We have to keep books local and public. Kids won't find books unless books are a visible daily part of their culture. And if you know a family without books, buy them some, help their kids to read. We can all do something. I can't stand the Cameron Big Society rubbish but I do believe in making a personal difference. When I worry about something I try to stop myself worrying by getting active. When I was worried about factory farming I went veggie and campaigned for decent standards of husbandry. I worry about climate change so I support Friends of the Earth but also I have a ground source heatpump and solar panels. I worry about wildflowers so I do guerilla planting. I worried about little shops disappearing so I agreed to set up a deli in a property I own in London. And so on. Worrying is the basis for change. If you have bad dreams, wake up.

If some other intelligence arrived in front of you right now and wondered about out our species, what would you say makes us special as a species? What is our greatest strength, and most crippling weakness?

Our capacity for imagination and invention. The worlds we make in our minds and then make real with our hands. Our weakness is our failure to love - each other, the planet, animals, ourselves as we really are.

You helped to save my mind once. When I was 24 I suffered a breakdown, and stopped reading for a while. I was in a state of continual panic. I tried reading but found it very hard to focus on anything. Years later when I read Why Be Happy... I found my own experience echoed back. 'I was in the place before language. The abandoned place...' I cried cathartic tears. When I was ill, reading your novels, I found your writing had a force to it that somehow reached in and pulled me forward. It somehow gave me a wind in my sails. Is this why you write, to reach people and impact on them? If not, why do you write?

Books have been pockets of air in an upturned boat all my life.Thank you for telling me that. Books have been pockets of air in an upturned boat all my life. I write because I want to understand things for myself. I want to be able to put into words things difficult to think. Things difficult to feel. I want a language where there is no language. You know how it is when you go abroad and you speak a bit of the lingo, enough to ask the way and order a meal and catch the right train, but the moment you want to say something more complex you find you don't have the language and so the thought itself has to shrink to the language available? That happens in our own language. It is why we must never dumb down or try and paraphrase Shakespeare or go for a simple version of a wide idea. Language expands us - and the more language we have the better able we are to confront the world. I am not talking about cleverness or oily fluency. I mean a rich and deep language. That is what I want to find. That is what I want to offer. It is why I love to read poetry; that resonance, that richness. And here's something useful. If you have those crazy voices in your head or that dull repetition of the same old thing, get up, stand in front of the mirror and recite or read out loud a poem. The strong voice of the poem will drive away the babble in your head. And then your own voice can be heard again. Art is the most practical of pursuits.

Can you ever see yourself not writing?

Yes and no. I will always work with words just as I will always grow vegetables and light my own fire and have a cat. The shape or form is less sure. And maybe it doesn't matter. Once you direct your life towards its simplicity - which is whatever you love and recognise as essential to you - then the rest follows.  

What does reading and writing add to your life?

It is my life.

Read more from Matt Haig's residency

Jeanette Winterson's website