Janet Fitch's debut novel, White Oleander, made her an instant success and a fan favorite. As she sat down to write her next novel, she found herself facing the blank page and new struggles.
Fitch makes it clear she writes for herself first because writing is her passion. In this special indudstry interview, she talks about her height of popularity with White Oleander, living up to the hype with her second book and her writing inspirations.
After the tremendous success of your debut novel, White Oleander, what was it like to sit down and write your next book?
Easy, then hard. I thought that I was handling the success very well-I was just a writer, doing what I do, just keep on the way I always had... The book was a separate entity; it went off and did well for itself, groovy. I had no idea what an impact it would have on me.
When you have a big book, there seem to be three stages (if you don't count the 'nothing will change' stage). Stage one--you think you're Godzilla. You can do anything. You can eat cars, you can crush cities. You take on huge ideas, and make a terrific mess.
Stage two-you shrink to about the size of a single cell. You can do nothing, you stink, you're a fraud. You can't admit to anyone what's happening to you.
Stage three--You go back to basics. You remember that you can do a few things. Then a few more.
Gradually, you regain a somewhat human size, and you're working again, scarred and humbled but grateful. It was a bizarre and none-too-comfortable ride.mselves, and it's the absolute epicenter of culture clash, the great intersection of the 21st Century.
For instance, through Michael, Meredith and the grandfather, Mauritz, the legacy of the Holocaust forms the great subconscious of the book. This is the story of the émigré artists who came to Los Angeles in the Thirties, fleeing the Nazi regime. They settled in Los Angeles, and like the grandfather, began working in the Hollywood studios.
In the process, they contributed a major shot of European high culture to LA-and yet could not escape the tragedy they had left behind. The legacy of the Holocaust sets the stage for tragedy in Paint It Black.
Josie represents another legacy--that of the American Dust Bowl and the movement of migrant workers to California. The Tyrells came here to work the crops and then, and still do, labor in the oil fields of Bakersfield. That the grandson of Mauritz Loewy, a Jewish composer from Vienna, and the granddaughter of Okies fleeing the agricultural disaster of the Thirties, would come together at all is a quintessentially Los Angeles story.
You've said that the central question of Paint It Black is "what happens to a dream when the dreamer is gone?" Will you explain that?
When someone sees something in you that you don't see yourself, you believe it only as long as you can be with them-as long as you can see yourself through their eyes, borrowing their vision of you. But when they're gone, you're orphaned.
You can't help but question whether or not it was them who created this vision, or whether it was really you. Josie Tyrell has to come to terms with the vision of herself that Michael Faraday saw in her, the world he opened for her. Does it still exist after he's gone?
Astrid from White Oleander and Josie and Meredith from Paint It Black are all linked by loneliness. For each woman, the one person who means the most is taken from them. What is it that keeps bringing you back to this tragic aspect of the human condition?
Loss is the constant. Loss is the human condition.
How to survive loss, to incorporate it without denying it, drowning in it or being poisoned by it, as I see it, is one of the great challenges of human existence. And loneliness, the result of this loss--drives us to seek one another's company, it engenders love. On the other hand, it can also drive us mad.
