Jeanette Winterson tells the story of how a painful past, which she thought she had overcome, rose to haunt her later in life, sending her on a maddening search for her biological mother. Through her story, Winterson also shows how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft that supports us when we are

What happens when one of the finest novelists of our time doesn't know the beginning of her own life story? Adopted six weeks after she was born, Jeanette Winterson was raised by a woman who claimed "[t]he devil led [her] to the wrong crib," kept a revolver next to the Pledge, and unwittingly gave her daughter the title of this memoir. In her journey through madness and finding her beginnings, Winterson offers readers much more than the satisfaction of voyeuristic curiosity that marks so

—Lucia Silva