Born in Manchester, she became the adopted daughter of Pentecostal Evangelist parents, and was a preacher by age 8. She rebelled against her upbringing, and was kicked out by her family when she came out at 15. Her upbringing and training for evangelistic service, as well as the realization of her lesbian identity, were drawn on for her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, which was successfully adapted for TV in 1990.

The author of such provocative recent novels as Sexing the Cherry, Written on the Body, and Art and Lies, lives in England, and she is very spicy and engaging when she gets personal. "I am a writer who happens to love women. I am not a lesbian who happens to write," she states in The Semiotics of Sex, where she also argues that the "Queer World" misreads art as sexuality and that a great deal of gay writing about the AIDS crisis is therapy and release - but not art.