How close can you come through adoration and physical intimacy with another person? In a culture that exults in sex to the point of desensitization, this careful study of the body is miraculous and nostalgic.

Winterson offers a version of love that revels in physical minutiae and imperfections to ask the question of how well we can know another through their body. The bone runs in perfect scale from sternum to scapula. I find the openings between the springs of muscle where I can press myself into the chords of your neck. If I push my fingers into the recesses behind the bone I find you like a soft shell crab. The first stringed instrument with a keyboard. I cannot think of the double curve lithe and flowing with movement as a bony ridge, I think of it as the musical instrument that bears the same root. THE CLAVICLE PROVIDES THE ONLY BONY LINK BETWEEN THE UPPER EXTREMITY AND THE AXIAL SKELETON. THE SHAFT OF THE BONE IS ROUGHENED FOR THE ATTACHMENT OF THE MUSCLES. THE CLAVICLE OR COLLAR BONE: THE CLAVICLE IS A LONG BONE WHICH HAS A DOUBLE CURVE.

During a break in the plot, she takes several parts of Louise’s body and pairs their anatomical definitions with poetic declarations of love: It runs boundless through her lyrical prose where she dissects its effects on the body, mind, and heart. In writing without a clear sex/gender, Winterson strips love of the usual boxes and frees it from the usual cliches. The most consistent element is the narrator’s overwhelming love for Louise. Winterson is masterful and allows the narrator to speak and act in ways that are sometimes stereotypically feminine and sometimes stereotypically masculine. Many readers might assume the narrator’s sex based on Louise’s, but by including lovers of both sexes, Winterson sidesteps this potential assumption. However, the narrator carries on romantic relationships with both men and women. Written on the Body is a love story detailing the narrator’s love for a married woman, Louise. “If a character does _, why do you assume they’re a woman?” Winterson is careful to never push her narrator too close to conventional ideas of masculinity or femininity, and even though students in both classes tried to guess, this only forced us to examine our own biases and assumptions. So much in our society carries the implication of being “for women,” or “for men,” but Written on the Body refuses to define its narrator this way. This book was required reading for two of my college lit courses: one for modern women authors and another titled “queer theory.” The former because Written on the Body was written by Jeannette Winterson in 1992 the latter because the unnamed narrator is of an undefined sex and gender.

Winterson written on the body