Announcing the Special Guest

We are pleased to welcome Dylan Landis as the special guest in conversation with Janet Fitch and host John Freeman about White Oleander, the California Book Club’s March selection, this Thursday evening.

Landis, who is based in Los Angeles, is the author of the Rainey Royal cycle. It comprises three books, each of which is, structurally, a novel in stories about the same troubled girls and their difficult families in 1970s and ’80s Greenwich Village in New York City: Normal People Don’t Live Like This, Rainey Royal, and List of All Possible Desires. Rainey Royal was a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and one of its stories was an O. Henry Prize selection.

In Rainey Royal, the titular character, a sharp, occasionally cruel teenager at the start of the novel in October 1972, makes her way through 14 interlinked stories that take her into young adulthood. Initially, her mother swings between Rainey’s jazz-musician father, Howard, and her father’s best friend, Gordy, who lives in the same house, along with other musicians; later, her mother abandons the family for a Colorado ashram, and Gordy becomes inappropriate with Rainey, tucking her in and giving her back rubs. We learn that “Gordy never says it is a secret, yet she senses that her silence is required. She has not told anyone but [her best friend] Tina. Often she wishes she had not.”

Later on, Rainey tells her father, but he doesn’t care—his primary concern is whether or not the musicians who live in his house are talented. The school psychologist calls multiple times about Rainey “engaging” with male teachers, and teachers notice the home situation and attempt to confront Howard. Instead, he turns the tables on them to criticize how they teach his daughter art. She’s the sort of girl who spends her after-school hours drawing at museums, but, Howard suggests, after coercing her to smoke in the meeting with the teachers, they don’t encourage Rainey’s genuine talent. “By definition, the artist lives outside of society and mirrors it to itself, whether he goes to college or not,” he says. “Are you noticing any lack of intelligence in my daughter? You’re not? Then—ladies, gentlemen—are we really here to discuss a few missed pages of homework for a girl who spends every afternoon in a museum?” Down the road, Rainey will steal from others to make tapestries. We wonder how the chaos of her home life and friendships will affect Rainey’s development; whether she’ll be an artist; and if so what kind, and the suspense imposed by these questions drives the novel.

Like Astrid, the protagonist of White Oleander, Rainey grows up before her time in a world of adults who fail to put her needs first. Both main characters are vulnerable, both neglected and abused, yet they retain their agency and subvert expectations. Thursday’s gathering is bound to feature a meaningful conversation about teen and young adult experience, its challenges, and a life in the arts. Please join us.•

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