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Event Recap: ‘White Oleander’
At the Zoom gathering to discuss Janet Fitch’s novel White Oleander, host John Freeman asked Fitch about the research that the author did to understand what her protagonist, Astrid Magnussen, who grows up in the foster care system, goes through in different homes. He noted Fitch’s past as a journalist. Fitch explained that when you write an experience that’s not yours, you have to do research.
A Map of Girlhood
When you are a child you are yourself and you know and see everything prophetically,” Jean Rhys writes in her gimlet-eyed novel After Leaving Mr. Mackenzie, the tale of what happens when a woman leaves her last older lover and goes home.
Excerpt: ‘White Oleander’
The Santa Anas blew in hot from the desert, shriveling the last of the spring grass into whiskers of pale straw. Only the oleanders thrived, their delicate poisonous blooms, their dagger green leaves. We could not sleep in the hot dry nights, my mother and I. I woke up at midnight to find her bed empty. I climbed to the roof and easily spotted her blond hair like a white flame in the light of the three-quarter moon. “Oleander time,” she said.
Why I Write: To Make Meaning Out of Chaos
My mother used to take me on errands when I was 9, 10 years old. There we’d be, in line at the bank, bored, and she’d point to someone and say, “Tell me about that man. What’s his name?” It was my favorite game with her. “What does he do for a living?” Turns out I was very good at it. “Is he married? What’s his wife like? Does he have kids?” And I would go on and on, deepening my portrayal of his life, wife, kids, problems.
Why You Should Read This: ‘White Oleander’
It’s tempting to imagine that Janet Fitch’s first novel for adults, White Oleander, came out of nowhere, but that’s not quite the case. Published in 1999, the novel was almost immediately selected by Oprah’s Book Club—in that era, perhaps the most visible arbiter of literary taste in the United States.
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