Six Degrees of Literary (and Cultural) Separation

There's a story behind my decision to read Jeanette Winterson's Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, but now is not the time to tell it.  Now is the time to say this: it must, must be the lovechild of Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Nigel Slater's Toast--the two books met on a shelf somewhere, had a torrid affair, and spawned a Winterson novel.  (I do realize Slater wrote Toast quite a bit after Oranges, but it's still a tempting thought).

Moreover, the protagonist's adoptive mother is a dead ringer for Mrs. Kim, the bible-thumping seventh-day-adventist Korean mom from The Gilmore Girls.  

It may be a bit wrong to publicly betray one's feelings about a book just halfway through, but I can't resist.  Every time I start a paragraph I have to remind myself what I'm reading.