White Oleander - Janet Fitch [186]
Did you always have the idea of Ingrid being undone by an affair?
Absolutely. That’s a common experience. Many women get involved with a man that you pretty much know isn’t suitable and you’re kind of breaking your rules, but he’s attractive in some unknown way. And then he doesn’t even realize what a sacrifice you’re making by being with him and he dumps you! [Laughs.] And you’re just so angry at yourself for breaking your rules and angry at him for not realizing what he’s given up. I think it’s one step from that to, if you’re an extreme unbalanced person, just going off the deep end.
Did the idea of Astrid going through a series of foster homes follow from the idea that Ingrid was going to wind up in jail?
If a murder happens, the first question is, is she arrested or not. If she wasn’t, what’s the point? It negates the act. I’ve always been concerned with what happens to children in our soci-ety when there’s nobody left to take care of them. I’ve always been aware of that, and of course she would end up in foster care — and start moving from house to house and really seeing the various components of our society. We don’t have a unitary society anymore, you know; it’s very fragmented. I look up and down my block in Silver Lake [Los Angeles] and there is a different universe in every house. Fifty completely different worlds, and who would see that better than somebody in foster care?
This is the first novel you’ve written?
This is the first novel that’s seen the light of day.
Tell me a little bit about your writing life up until this point.
Oh, the long sad story. No — it’s a story of courage and struggle. I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become a historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn’t want to spend my life in the library. I wanted to be Anaïs Nin, I wanted to have adventures and look glamorous. What a mistaken idea of what a writer’s life is like!
Then what?
I wrote short stories. I went to film school for a while. I wrote screenplays, which were terrible. And I realized that if I was never going to make any money at writing, never going to sell anything as long as I lived, I might as well do what I wanted to do. Because then, no matter what, I would have spent my life doing what I wanted to do. So, I went back to writing fiction and just kept writing and learning. I had to learn to write. The desire preceded the ability. Let’s see, I started writing fiction in ’78 or ’79, and I went to film school for a semester — not even a semester. It was a debacle.
Why was it a debacle?
Because I’m really a writer. To make films you have to have boundless energy, you have to work and play with others really, really well, and I’m really a more contemplative kind of person. I like to sit at home and think, a lot. And have time to read and think and walk the dog. To live in my car and eat at Burger King three times a day and be constantly trying to persuade people to do things . . . I just couldn’t do it. In film, you reenact things in physical reality. And physical reality is recalcitrant. I can write a line like, “She picks him up and drags him onto the bed,” but if she can’t pick him up and you’re struggling, then it’s two hours later, and people are starting to walk, and say, “Hey, I got to go.” It was just wrong, but at least I found out. It was terrible. I was crying every morning when I woke up and had to do it again. My husband said, just forget it, forget it.
So, I went back to writing fiction. I became a newspaper editor in Colorado. I was the editor/reporter/photographer, I set the type, I laid out the pages. I did that for two years, which is a very demanding job. And then when I quit in ’87, I wrote 18 short stories that first year and I’ve been writing ever since. It’s been 20 years since I started writing. It was 12 years after I first started writing before I