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. She was initially stumped as to how to find foster kids to talk to, so she instead spoke to women who had recently been foster children. She posted flyers at Planned Parenthood, in 12-step rooms, and at the local junior college asking onetime foster children to contact her. The goal of this research wasn’t so much to use their stories as fodder for the book but to make sure her imagination was right, that what she was seeing as the story of White Oleander was correct. Only one story in the novel came from a respondent; it is the home where a padlock is placed on the refrigerator.
Freeman noted that Astrid is put in a variety of circumstances, and that although there are different kinds of brutalities in the novel, there are also instances of tenderness. He asked how Astrid unfolded as a character. Fitch explained that, at first, there was no Astrid, only her mother, Ingrid, who was inspired by the writer Sei Shōnagon, who wrote The Pillow Book in Japan and who was the ultimate aesthete. “You could behead somebody right in front of her, and she would only care whether it was well done or not, but if somebody wore the wrong color combinations, it could set her back for weeks,” Fitch said. She thought about what would happen if you took this aristocratic way of seeing the world but gave the woman a crummy job and apartment. Ingrid was born. However, the writers’ workshop Fitch belonged to, run by novelist Kate Braverman, said that it hated Ingrid and asked that Fitch give Ingrid a friend or coworker, through whom readers could see the story. Fitch gave Ingrid a daughter, Astrid, whom Fitch had a hard time writing about, at first. Fitch does self-hypnosis, and so to develop the character, she went into her self-hypnosis, which involved a beautiful garden. “Astrid came out of the garden and sat next to me on the bench, and I said, ‘Astrid, what? What is it with you? What am I not getting?’ And she put her head on my lap and said, ‘Janet, I am so lonely.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, now I get it. Now I get you.’”
Dylan Landis, the author of Rainey Royal and other books, joined the conversation. She commented that White Oleander is saturated with place and asked how Fitch “got L.A. injected into the bones of this book.” Fitch responded that she is very much a writer of place and that she knows Los Angeles so well. She explained, “It’s a very neighborhood city,” and continued, “I think that, in a way, GPS has kind of ruined that, because people only think of getting from here to there, and they usually take a freeway and they just don’t have a sense of how the city is put together, how these neighborhoods mesh. But I looked up my street in L.A.—I live in the Silver Lake neighborhood—and I looked at my street, and I realized there was a different world in every house. So, there are the microworlds. There’s the neighborhood, but there are also the microworlds of every house.” Landis pointed out that this is a realization Astrid has at one point.
Later on, Landis asked about the notebooks that Fitch keeps, referencing her notebooks on weather, light, and botany. “I know that they’ve helped you write your books set in L.A. Please tell us about how you employ them and keep them.” Fitch noted that she keeps sensory details in her notebooks. It’s not that she necessarily uses what she writes in her notebooks in her work, but notebook-keeping is “like weight lifting.” “Once you’ve done 10 pages on cinnamon…you go walk by an alley, and instead of going, ‘Oh, it stinks,’ you know to be curious” and go into the alley to see what it really smells like.
Fitch implied that in writing, you shouldn’t do too much “dry labbing.” In college, dry labbing is where chemistry students know the experiment’s result, which can be fraudulent, and so they don’t actually perform the experiment but simply write it up. “That was called dry labbing, because you don’t get wet,” Fitch said. “And, you know, you can’t dry-lab fiction. You can’t dry-lab the world. You have to experience the world directly. Take notes. Be curious. Not, What is it, but what is it really? That’s always the question you’re asking.”•
Join us on April 16 at 5 p.m. Pacific time, when Robert Hass will sit down with host John Freeman and a special guest to discuss Praise. Register for the Zoom conversation here.
