White Oleander - Janet Fitch [185]
White Oleander
by Janet Fitch
A READING GROUP GUIDE
o•le•an•der n. A poisonous Eurasian evergreen shrub (Nerium oleander) having fragrant, white, rose, or purple flowers and whorled leaves [Med. Lat., prob. alteration of L. lat. lorandrum, alter-ation of Lat. rhododendron].
— American Heritage College Dictionary
This astonishing novel, universally praised for its lyrical beauty and narrative power, tells an unforgettable story of mothers and daughters, their ambiguous alliances, and the search for love and identity.
On Writing White Oleander
Janet Fitch talks with Laura Miller, Editorial Director of Salon.com
Recently, Janet Fitch’s life has had an enchanted quality. At 43 — after 22 years of laboring away at her fiction, publishing the occasional story in small literary magazines — she has seen her first novel, White Oleander, become a national bestseller. But White Oleander itself is no fairy tale. It’s the story of Astrid Magnussen, daughter of the beautiful, merciless poet Ingrid. In Venice Beach, mother and daughter live a peripatetic bohemian lifestyle ruled by Ingrid’s rigorous idea of beauty (three white flowers in a plain glass vase is the epitome of her aesthetic) and her contempt for emotional weakness. When Ingrid condescends to an affair with a less than exquisite man, falls in love and then is summarily dumped, she poisons her former lover and eventually winds up in prison. Astrid then begins a journey through a series of foster homes, in each one learning about sex, money, love, independence, courage, rage and the manifold ways of becoming a woman.
Tell me about the genesis of White Oleander.
I had the character of Ingrid first. She was actually the protagonist of a short story. It was black comedy. There’s a writer, Sei Shonagon. She was a lady-in-waiting to the Heian empress in Japan in the 11th century.
She wrote The Pillow Book.
Yes. It was about a society based on aesthetics. Soldiers were promoted by how well they wrote poetry. Of course the Heian empire didn’t last very long. They were pretty easy to wipe out. It was a time of tremendous refinement, where the aristocrats would have a party in which they would go and look at moonlight on a pond. But they had no conventional morality. Sei Shonagon could see somebody beheaded right in front of her and it’s like, pfft, there’s no connection between her and that person. But if somebody wore the wrong color combinations in their robes, then for days she just couldn’t get over it, how disgusting it was. I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to take someone like that, an aesthete, which is an aristocratic position, and put them at the end of the 20th century in America, with a crummy job and a crummy apartment, having to make a living, and see what happened. And so Ingrid emerged.
People read that story and they hated my character, Ingrid. They didn’t want to walk a mile in her moccasins. They didn’t want to be her; they said, “She ’s a monster, you cannot have her as your protagonist. Give her a co-worker, give her a friend, someone to see her through.” And so I gave her a daughter. And suddenly it wasn’t funny anymore. When you’re the kid of someone who is an extreme person, it’s not funny at all. And then the tone changed, and the perspective changed, and I got something very different, which was much better.
Then you had a short story and . . .
I had a short story and I sent it around. I send all my short fiction to Ontario Review because Joyce Carol Oates is associate editor there, and I think she’s fantastic. They rejected it, but I got a little Post-it note saying “Too long for us. Liked it but seemed more like the first chapter of a novel.” I thought, oh, Joyce Carol Oates