Yesterday I attended a Guardian Masterclass book club with Jeanette Winterson. I remember reading her Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit at my Erasmus  exchange year at Trinity College in Dublin. I liked it but I still remember a vague feeling of discomfort, probably as the openness of her book on the topic of homosexuality was new to me. My Prague curriculum did not include openly queer pieces of work and I do not remember ever discussing it in our seminars (although, this may be my memory failing me).

Since then, I have collected a number of her books but have only read one more – Written on the Body. When I tried to buy the Frankissstein  yesterday I was told they have three copies coming as one of the booksellers is a big fan and sells it to people all the time.

And so I attended the book club, hosted by Lisa Allardice, unprepared and below is what I took away from it:

Winterson was asked to explain why she focused on artificial intelligence in the book and she answered that she has been trying to find out what was going on in that field for years and has always been curious where it may take us. She also drew an interesting parallel with religion as both AI and religion ultimately tell us that our body is not the last of us and there is more after our body fades.

She then asked what would happen if through perfecting the AI we end up creating something that is smarter than us. 

Ultimately, she sees the AI as a means of liberating ourselves from our bodies and wondered what that would mean for the binary perception of gender.

Winterson thought up Frankissstein for the 200^th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as she realised that we may be the first generation that can actually bring Shelley’s idea to life through AI. She also mentioned that at the time Frankenstein was written Lord Gordon Byron’s daughter Ada, later to be knows as Ada Lovelace, the “first [person] to recognise the full potential of computers”[1], had just been born. She set the novel in the present times with direct references to presidents Trump and Bolsonaro because “the now is where it is all happening”.

She went on to say that the best writing is “writing from a wound” and that we should offer ourselves through our wound to the others and that we should work on what is an issue in our times to make it easier for those that come after us. We should remember that we may not see the fruit of our work and should find inspiration in the cathedral builders who knew they will never see the final result.

There is much more she said but what I took away from that hour is that Jeanette Winterson is effortlessly likeable, at least for me, and I also got the confirmation of something I already suspected just based on the couple of books, interviews and articles I have read; that she is a person I would like to have at  my dinner table. Not because she is a great writer whose books I enjoy but because she is that kind of a person. Warm, personable and boundlessly human.

There is now a YouTube video available of the conversation (added 24 July 2020).

[1] ‘Ada Lovelace’, Wikipedia (last edited 14 July 2020),  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ada_Lovelace , accessed 17 July 2020.