Reading the Cards

A few days before the winds started and Los Angeles caught fire, I went to novelist Janet Fitch’s house for a New Year’s Day tarot party—I brought my mother, daughter, and husband. This is the surreal thing about living in a place like L.A.—one day, you’re reading a book; the next day, the book’s author is reading your tarot cards. There were cauldrons of Russian soup and people gathered around a big dining room table with their own tarot decks, giving one another readings for the coming year. There was generosity and warmth and ease—“a California feeling,” as my mom called it, which makes a lot of sense if you’ve read Janet’s work.

I read White Oleander soon after I’d moved to L.A. It felt like an emotional twin for my first book—a narcissistic poet mother, Ingrid; a parentified daughter, Astrid, who wants to be loved; a leeriness toward the grandiosity of art-making but also a belief in its magical power. The book has an intensity that makes it hard to put down. There is a nakedness to the daughter’s yearning and rage. When I gave it to my mom to read, she said, “Uh-oh, everyone is going to think you copied her!” And I knew what she meant. My book felt as if it had been grown from the same soil—the Russian greats; noir films, grainy and depraved; Anne Sexton and other poets.

The monstrous and beautiful Ingrid is delicious. My shadow self. Yes, by day I am dutiful and present, but what mother-artist doesn’t fantasize, once in a while, about being Ingrid, behaving selfishly, compulsively, prioritizing their work over stability? Ingrid’s open ambitions, obsessions, and fragile ego, her disinterest in the more boring aspects of parenting—relatable! Sometimes children are boring and their needs are at odds with our own! Sometimes we cringe about our exes who wore us down and then broke up with us! Yes, I tend to my child and don’t murder my exes, just follow them on social media and like their engagement photos, but I guess this is the difference between sinful thoughts versus sinful deeds. Ingrid’s disinterest in social norms and her desire for beauty in a life that’s often full of drudgery—there’s something to learn there. When Ingrid gets sent to prison, she treats it like a prolonged art residency. Maybe it’s not MacDowell, but you don’t have to think about what to make yourself for dinner. I admire her single-mindedness. In a country where artists face hostility and indifference, where the National Endowment for the Arts redirects grants from writers to AI competency, maybe it helps to be a little crazy?

The first time I had my tarot read was at a friend’s baby shower; I’d just finished writing my first book and wanted to know what would happen to it. I asked the reader, Was I on the precipice of the kind of success that would be too much for me to handle? She laid down card after ominous card on the table in front of me—a skeleton on a horse, people plummeting from a burning tower, a woman awake at night weeping, someone lying face down in the dirt with 10 swords sticking out of his back. “It will take a while for things to happen for this book,” the reader carefully told me, “but don’t lose hope.”

In tarot, there are four suits, like in a deck of cards. The wands represent the element of fire—passion and creativity. In the book, these are Ingrid’s suit—and she’s the queen witch. Swords represent air—intellect and logic. Cups represent water—intuition and emotions. And coins or pentacles represent earth—the material world, money, and the home.

I had a friend who’d read her tarot over and over. Would she stay in her marriage? she asked, hoping each time for the cards to say yes. But the cards did not lie. Usually people know the answers to their own questions, but sometimes they need to keep seeing a heart stabbed with three swords to know what they know.

When Janet read my cards, I asked her about my third book, which I’d started but put on hold to take on other work. Would I finish writing it in 2025?

She laid out a Celtic Cross spread. There, the card representing my “challenge” for the year, the five of pentacles—two beggars in the snow, behind them the stained glass of a church glowing invitingly as they stand on the outside. It’s not a very auspicious card (duh!). I remember Janet looking at the beggars and saying, “Yes, this looks bad, but all the other cards are so good.” Tarot is about context and interpretation: “You’re in poor-me energy, even though you’re surrounded with support.”

I kept telling myself that all year, as various things happened that made me feel like a beggar in the snow. No, I would say, the snow crunching under my bare feet. Everything is here. You just need to turn around and go toward the light.

So, would I finish the book?

I would not, she told me.

(I did not.)

I got a deck and started reading my cards myself. I thought of Ingrid being all about the wands. Well, I kept getting coins. Pentacles, pentacles, pentacles. Why do I, spacey and impractical, keep getting pentacles?

“Come back to earth, bitch!” The cards seemed to be saying to me. “You’re needed here. Stop floating away!”

I realize the irony of turning to the occult just to be told to get a grip.

This New Year’s, I was out of town, and so I laid out a spread for myself. Would I finish the book in 2026?

Yes, most definitely, the cards said.

Or this, anyway, is what I heard.•

Join us on March 19 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Fitch will sit down with special guest Dylan Landis and host John Freeman to discuss White Oleander. Register for the Zoom conversation here.

cover of a novel titled paradiso 17 by hannah lillith assadi

Knopf

SEARCH FOR HOME

Critic Lauren LeBlanc reviews Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17. —Alta

a woman with long dark hair seated outdoors in a casual pose

ART AS SAVING GRACE

Past CBC author Luis J. Rodriguez’s Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A. turns 30 this year. Vincent Price Art Museum will be showing related photographs from April 14 through June 13. —Vincent Price Art Museum

Kayte Deioma

BUILDING CONFIDENCE

West Hollywood poet laureate Jen Chang has created a program, Feng Shui Poetry in the Parks, that has Boyle Heights students using nature around the city as a point of inspiration for poetry. —Los Angeles Times