Language

 Language carries a risk we don’t like to admit: we rarely hear each other cleanly. We listen with preference, with fear, with private hunger. So when someone speaks, we aren’t receiving something intact. We’re adjusting it, bending it, filling in the gaps with what we need it to mean.

Winterson’s line from Written on the Body turns that into something almost mutual. The speaker invents, and the listener invents back. Both sides are shaping language at the same time. And if we’re honest, that feels familiar. In love especially, we don’t want the other person’s words as they are. We want confirmation and reassurance. We want a promise that might not actually have been offered.

The novel itself is slippery about identity. The narrator’s gender is never revealed. That choice, which was bold when the book appeared in 1992, forces readers to confront their own assumptions. Many tried to guess, to decode and pin it down. Winterson refused. She’d already built a reputation for defying categorisation after Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, her first novel drawn from her Pentecostal upbringing and her experience growing up adopted in a strict religious household. She has always resisted being fixed in place, whether by genre, sexuality, or expectation. So in Written on the Body, withholding the narrator’s gender becomes more than a trick. It exposes how much readers project. We invent what we want to hear, or in this case, what we want to see.

That projection isn’t just confined to literature. In ordinary life, it’s often how relationships survive for as long as they do. We hear devotion in something that might only be habit. We hear commitment in something that might only be comfort. And sometimes we hear rejection where none was intended because we’re already braced for it. The invention  is protective. If you’ve grown up feeling unwanted, you’ll detect withdrawal quickly and if you’ve been abandoned, you’ll translate silence as threat. We don’t do this consciously, but it shapes the story we think we’re in.

There’s something slightly humiliating in admitting that we might not love the person in front of us as much as our version of them. The mind is quick. It fills in motives and edits tone. It adds emphasis. Winterson’s lovers in the novel are consumed by desire, but desire distorts. The body becomes text. Skin becomes surface to read. And reading always involves interpretation. You can’t approach it empty.

This idea also sits alongside work by other women writers who have questioned how much of intimacy is narrative. Maggie Nelson, in The Argonauts, writes about language straining to keep up with lived experience, especially around gender and desire. Words are loaded, historical, and partial. But she still uses them, because what else is there. That’s the bind. We need language to connect, yet it carries our biases with it.

And then there’s Deborah Levy, whose essays in The Cost of Living describe how women are often trained to edit themselves so that others feel comfortable. In that dynamic, invention becomes strategic. You say what can be heard and you trim what might provoke. Meanwhile, the listener hears only what fits their frame. It isn’t equal. Power shapes whose invention prevails.

Winterson knows something about being misheard. Her work has been praised and dismissed in equal measure. She’s been accused of self-mythologising, of blurring memoir and fiction too freely. Yet that blurring seems consistent with the idea that stories are always shaped. She doesn’t present a stable self because perhaps she doesn’t believe one exists outside narrative.

If both speaker and listener are inventing, then certainty becomes fragile. It suggests that many arguments aren’t about facts but about competing interpretations of tone and intention. It suggests that reconciliation requires more than explanation. It requires curiosity about how the other person constructed what they heard.

Still, I don’t think the line is entirely bleak. There’s creativity in it. If we invent what we want to hear, then listening isn’t passive. It’s active and imaginative. That can be dangerous, but it can also be generous. You can choose to interpret someone’s awkward words as kindness rather than indifference. You can decide not to assume the worst. The invention doesn’t have to serve fear.

And yet that choice isn’t always available. When trust is thin, invention tends to turn defensive. We protect ourselves by anticipating harm. We rewrite what’s said so we can brace. It’s difficult to lower that guard once it’s formed.

What the line leaves me with isn’t a solution but a question about responsibility. If I know that you’re likely to hear through your own history, do I speak more carefully, or do I accept that misreading is inevitable. And if I know I’m shaping your words to suit myself, am I willing to pause and ask whether that’s fair. There’s no clean way to resolve it. We’re stuck with language and with ourselves, and with the space between them.

© Echoes of Women - Fiona.F, 2026. All rights reserved