“Trust me, I’m telling you my life story”: Queer Return in the memoirs of Jeanette Winterson and Jackie Kay

Abstract

This essay will consider the notion of ‘queer return’ through examining the experience of adoption in Jeanette Winterson’s Why be happy when you could be normal (2011) and Jackie Kay’s Red Dust Road (2010). I will use definitions of Derrida’s ‘eccentricity’ to expand the remit of the word queer.