I read it because I want them to understand what I understood, before I could name it, at fifteen, when I first read this book. Until you can do what Jeanette Winterson does with clichés, these words are forbidden. I forbid you from ‘unlocking pain.’ In fact, do not use the word pain, ever. You cannot just drop a bloody key into your novel about love.

You are not the first person to claim the clavicle, I tell them. Similarly, the shoulder blade, which also gets a treatment in this section of Winterson’s book. Because even by their tender ages, I feel safe to assume that many of them have already loved a clavicle, have mistaken it for their own precious corner. No, I read the passage because my students, like all beginning writers, trade heavily in cliché. They become the blueprints from which we map our own works of art, our own narratives, our own heartbreaks.

They imprint themselves on our consciousness as light does a photograph, or trauma the psyche, then slowly seep into us, syncopate with our hearts’ beating like a disease or an incessant prayer. Such is the way of influences, I suppose. Believe it or not, I have realized this similarity only just now, as I write this. I do not read the passage because I, too, have written a book about an obsession with a married woman, about the body as a palette, a metaphor, a dinner plate we fill and refill with our insatiable hungers. No, I wanted to fit you, not just in the obvious ways, but in so many indentations.’ You asked me if I wanted to strangle you. ‘I suppose the cleavage is the proper focus but what I wanted to do was fasten the index finger and thumb at the bolts of your collar bone, push out, spreading the web of my hand until it caught against your throat. ‘You have a dress with a décolletage to emphasize your breasts,’ the ungendered narrator reminds her lover, Louise, a married woman, and the object of an obsession that drives the entire novel.

This excerpt appears in a short ode to the clavicle. Just beyond the halfway point of Jeanette Winterson’s otherwise unchaptered novel, Written on the Body, she diverts the narrative into a series of passages under headings such as ‘The Skeleton’ and ‘ The Cells, Tissues, Systems and Cavities of the Body’. It is a rare classroom of students to whom I do not read this passage. – Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body The physical memory blunders through the doors the mind has tried to seal. To remember you, it’s my own body I touch. I thought difference was rated to be the largest part of sexual attraction but there are so many things about us that are the same.īone of my bone.

Written on the body jeanette