White Oleander - Janet Fitch [187]
You describe Kate Braverman as your mentor rather than as your teacher. Tell me a little bit about the relationship.
I’ve had teachers who haven’t made much of an impact, but when somebody completely transforms your world, that’s a mentor. Somebody who’s always challenging me and somebody who raises the standards, that’s what I needed. And she would attack a flaw as if it were a personal affront. She’s very epigrammatic. She would put things in a way that seared on your brain. I remember I brought in an early work. I was a former journalist, so I had a very straightforward, pedestrian style. I was trying to really punch it up and I brought in a story and she said, “You know, you could make a really good living as a romance writer. It’s a good living, you could do that.” And I remember going outside and sitting in my car and crying. Would I ever get it? If you wrote a line that thudded, she’d say, “What did you do, fax that in?” She demanded excellence, sentence by sentence, and she would make it very clear to you, in not a very tender way, if even a sentence wasn’t cutting it.
Did she also offer you advice or support about how to get by when there wasn’t that much validation coming from the outside world?
Her point of view was that it would always be hard, that you had to accept rejection and the difficulty of being an artist if you were going to make it at all. Because people who had mistaken ideas that it would be easy and glamorous were the ones whose disappointment would never allow them to hang in there.
How did White Oleander come to be published?
I’d gone to Squaw Valley Writer’s Conference. One day we got a leader who was so smart and so right, and I agreed with everything he said about people’s manuscripts, this editor Michael Pietsch. And I thought, gee, I’m going to remember this guy. And when I have a novel, I’m going to send it to him. So I sent it to him. It took him a while, a few months. The manuscript went to a couple of other publishers who turned it down, but in the end Michael took it.
Then the Oprah thing happens. What was that like?
I was at work. I worked one day a week at a government relations company. I did their writing, you know, brochures and letters and rewrote reports in English. I did everything, answered the phones, paid the bills. And I got this phone call at work and it was this very familiar voice.
Does she call you herself?
Yes. She talked and I sort of sat there with my mouth open. I was simply stunned out of my mind. Evidently I paid all the bills that day and I put every check in the wrong envelope. It took them weeks to unscramble that.
Some people in the book industry have an ambivalent relationship to Oprah. There’s a knee-jerk literary-world assumption that television can never be a good thing.
I think that Oprah’s on a mission to improve the lives of the average American in various ways. And one of them is to bring literature to people who would normally not be quite as demanding in their reading tastes, to show them writing that can be more than just entertainment. That it can change people, it can open us up, it can make us more human. I have a little shrine to Oprah, a little picture. I change the flowers every day and put a little incense. I feel she’s the patron saint of contemporary literature.
One of the things I love about this book is that you’re completely willing to let Ingrid be evil. It gives the story so much vitality. There’s not enough of that in literary fiction sometimes.
She’s very single-minded. And it’s very difficult to be the child of a single-minded person because everything goes one way. They’re not good listeners. They don’t look at that child and think, “Oh, she seems sad. I wonder what’s wrong.” Ingrid didn’t want to open that can of worms because it would limit her freedom. And she was pursuing her own vision of herself. We all have some of that,