This presentation assesses the significance of Jeanette Winterson's 'Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit' 25 years after its initial publication. It discusses the many ways in which the text circulates as a 'classic', as a much loved comic novel of growing up, as teaching material, as an aspect of popular/literary culture, and as part of Winterson’s own mythobiography. Its success may be attributed to the ways in which the narrative ‘hooks’ itself onto classic texts, which circulate in the culture’s collective unconscious. The paper combines these emphases to consider the novel as a literary classic that both inscribes and subverts the canonical tradition in the process of reworking autobiography as art. It draws on recent interviews with Winterson to suggest that the novel represents a ‘cover story’ that conceals the sense of loss intrinsic to Winterson’s origin story