Update: Janet Fitch will be judging our writing competition, so if you would like the opportunity to have Janet read your work, head over to our competitions page.
Recently, I had the opportunity to interview Janet Fitch, author of White Oleander, and her newest release Paint it Black, about the darker side of writing. Fitch is a lovely woman, thoughtful, a bit eccentric, with a great, maybe even slightly evil laugh. Many of her influences, including Edgar Allen Poe, are rather dark and Gothic, which after reading Paint it Black makes perfect sense. Fitch, like Poe, likes to play with death, “especially the idea of not letting go of people who are gone… and dedicating yourself to someone who is dead,” which permeates through Paint it Black.
Her book is not for everyone. Although it clips right along, it is not an easy read, because it asks the reader to go to places that most people are not normally comfortable with. The reader is put face to face with death in an extremely graphic way. But, for the reader who is willing to delve into the darker side of life and explore personal responses to death, or more to the point, suicide, there are rewards to be had.
I have to admit I was nervous before I sat down to speak with Fitch. After reading her book I felt I knew her so will and yet when I went to speak with her I realized I really didn’t know her at all. When I asked her my first question, I think I actually heard her deflate over the phone. Thank goodness it all seemed to turn around after that and by the end Fitch was more than willing to show off her distinct laugh.
Q. I couldn’t help but notice at first glance that both of your works had opposing colors in their titles, WHITE Oleander and Paint it BLACK, was there any reason for this?
A. I did my best not to do that. Plaint it Black just stuck. I didn’t really want to do that, it’s just the way it turned out.
Q. Paint it Black emphasizes color throughout the novel and especially in the more graphic scenes. In the opening scenes “red” and “black” are all around, yet during the tender flashbacks blue seems to cover the pages. Do you feel color has an effect your writing style?
A. I really write from the senses, I use the senses a great deal, and especially in a book that has to do with art and the problems with the artist. The visual plays a big part. Color has so much resonance to me, for different emotions, different moods. Kind of cognates to states of mind. Color symbolism means a lot to me.
Q. Your book is very LA centric, how does LA affect the tone or style of your book?
A. It’s a Los Angeles story. Yes, I could have written it about New York or Ohio, but this is the place that I know well enough to write about it in this way. I know what things mean. I know what neighborhoods feel like, and who would live there and the history behind them. Each part of the city is so evocative to me. The crop of the novel has to come from the soil of this city and no other city.
Q. Your book travels through the streets of LA, have you been to all of these places?
A. I have been! I’m from here. I know this city pretty well. My mothers from here, so I see it not only through my eyes but through her eyes. My grandmother came here in 22, so I can see it through her eyes too.
Q. Are there any places in LA that you found gave you inspiration for Paint it Black?
A. Los Feliz has always been a very haunted area. Those old, private houses. The streets are windy and the big Deodar cedars make the neighborhoods very dark. There’s a mysteriousness about those homes that I don’t find anywhere else in the city. So for this haunted family, it just seemed perfect. Then Echo Park is the perfect rock and roll neighborhood, where you could play your music late at night and whose going to say anything? Nobody. Especially back in the punk era. These little shacks that still exist, in other parts of the land they’ve torn them down because the land is too valuable, but you still can find those shacks in Echo Park, especially back in the Punk era. There’s a privacy about it and a kind of tolerance about Echo Park. It was rough around the edges which was part of it’s permissiveness, which I always really liked.
Q. The tone of the book is very personal and honest, do you feel like you can relate to your characters?
A. Your characters are all parts of yourself. You take pieces of yourself and you can split them off into different characters and then put them into interactions with each other. So Josie is part of me, and Michael is probably even more a part of me, and then I have some of Meredith as well. I took pieces of myself and set them to work. It’s interesting which ones survived. Who actually comes out of this and gains strength and understanding.
Q. What is your writing process?
A. I write best when I’m at home and I can keep my life as simple as possible and I work in a room in my house. I’m not one of those people who can go to cafes and write. I’m too sociable so if I go to cafes I’m going to talk to everybody. I have got to get very quiet to hear my characters. I work very much by ear and I’ve gotta hear them. I can’t even have music going. I need to just be able to hear them.
Q. Your works seems to be influenced by music, especially since the title of Paint it Black which is also a Rolling Stones song, how does music effect your writing?
A. I am totally influenced by it, by all the arts really. To me, music conveys nuisances of emotional states of mind. I’m influenced by painting, dance, theater, but music especially gets such gradation of emotions. When you need to express something sometimes by just playing the “The Cramps” really loud is just what you want. Other times you want to sit there with “Debussy” to reflect different kinds of moods.
Q. Do you feel that your work invites a certain type of reader?
A. I think that my work attracts a reader who is willing to really go down into the emotions. I find that, this is a pretty extreme book. Some people just don’t want to go there, they don’t want to go that far down into somebody who is struggling with the aftermath of suicide. Some people, they want to have a laugh or they want to escape. Where as other people are more interested in the range of human emotion and are exploring that range.
More often then not a young person is more willing to do that. Older people have sometimes had enough of that. Where the young reader is a little more open to going to extreme places and human experience. Also, a younger person is somebody who doesn’t bring the parental spin of “I don’t want my kid doing this” to the book.
Q. How did you feel about Mary Agnes Donoghue’s screen adaptation of your first novel White Oleander?
A. I was amazed at her ability to make an elegant structure for basically a big baggy monster. A novel is a big mess, generally speaking. For somebody to craft an elegant structure out from that is really impressive. I thought that she and the filmmakers did a really great job with it. There are things that I would have done differently, but I didn’t have to. (Laughs) I went to film school, I know how hard it is and I know my limitations. I can’t make anything shorter. When I try to cut anything it gets twice as long. I’m really a novelist. So I was very pleased with how it turned out.
Q. Would you ever like to work in film or write screenplays?
A. (Sounds like she’s about to say no) Well never say never, but it seems very hard for me. I just go off into my own world and go where ever it leads and find some kind of a structure to hold that. Where as screenwriting carries a structure, it has a certain length and a certain linearity, which just isn’t my natural way of working. But you know, whether I would ever do it, never say never! I mean, I love film. Often film has a lot to do with my work. I mean I have a film student in Paint it Black, and you know what, I was on that shoot! (Laughing)
Q. Do you feel that a novelist is possibly too visual to write a screenplay?
A. When you’re writing a novel you’re the writer, you’re also the Director, you’re also the designer, you’re also the camera man, you’re also the actors… You can do so many more things. You have a bigger palate than a screenwriter does and I like using that full palate. Also, you have to be so cooperative when you work in film. As a novelist you just do your thing and then you work with your editor and you sort of do what they want you to do, if you agree with it. But its very much a one man band. Where as film writing and any type of film work, is so collaborative, I don’t know that it would be temperamentally what I’m suited for.
And people give you NOTES, you get a lot of NOTES, and I’m just like I don’t want that pile of NOTES. Maybe from a couple of writers that I respect and my Editor, but that’s about all.
Q. I thought I heard something about you having a book club, are the rumors true?
A. It’s just some friends who were a long way from college, and we just thought it would be really fun to get together and really get into books, the way we had once upon a time. So we got together to read a book called, Under the Volcano, by Malcolm Lowry, because there’s just so much there and so much to unpack. It and was really successful and we just had such a good time. So we just meet every once in a while, very irregularly, it’s not one of those once a month kind of things. We read books that we’re a little afraid of reading by ourselves. This year we did Ulysses. It took a whole year, we had three meetings, and went through it six chapters at a time.
I enjoy really being able to take a whole evening and talk about a work of art. I mean you can go to a lecture or something, but to sit in a group with other smart people, and have a whole night to talk about a work of art. I can’t imagine anything that I like better than that.
Q. What do you think it takes to be a writer?
A. Definitely sitting down and actually writing, is the prerequisite. But most writer, all writers I would even venture to say, were readers before they were writers. There’s this sense of life being not as interesting as art. When I was a kid life really didn’t interest me at all, what was in my books, that was the life I wanted to find or get to. Life is just one damn thing after another, while art creates meaning, and to my mind, that’s really exciting.
Also, writing changes how you read in two ways. One is that you’re looking for something. When I’m writing, I get really impatient, I can’t really settle into books for the most part. It’s like I’m looking for something and I read the first 20 pages of a million things until I find something that just grabs me. Then I think “this is what I want.” So writers are very hard to satisfy. Not because we don’t appreciate the merits of what we’re seeing but because we’re looking for something in-particular.
So a lot of good books get passed by because your looking for something for a reason, to feed your own work and your own process. I have people who try to push books on me a lot and say “you’ve gotta read this, this was so great.” And I can see that its going to be a big juicy story. But I also see I’m not going to get anything out it. So maybe at some other time in my life these books would be great, but right now that’s not what I’m looking for.
Here is a list of Janet’s Top Five-ish Favorite Authors and explanation why:
Edgar Allen Poe
Fyodor Dostoevsky
William Faulkner
Tennesee Williams
Ingmar Bergman
And honorable mention to Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell
I’d start with Poe, which my brother used to read to me when I was a little kid and we were left to our own devices, and it would just scare the crap out of me, but I loved it too. Henry Miller had a big influence on me. Just the possibility of being a writer. I love Lawrence Durrell, the Alexandria Quartet, I would do anything to write like that. I re-read the Quartet every couple of years just because I love it so much. Bergman had a huge influence on Paint it Black, I started with a little story that was almost like “Persona” about this girl who becomes her dead boyfriend for his mother. I love Bergman.
Q. Any new books you would recommend?
A. Dead Boys: Stories- Richard Lange -Short stories about contemporary men that was just incredible. Very compassionate. It’s kind of gritty man struggling to have some hope about life, in the face of not having much hope about life, and how they continue to try to keep a good thought about things even though they’re going to hell. Which I think is very masculine. That’s why we like men, they try to keep it together, even if it’s falling apart. Wonderful short story collection.
Delivery Man- A new novel coming out, by a guy called Joe McGinniss Jr. and boy does he write well. He’s got a little Joan Didion going on there. It’s set in Las Vegas. He has a group of young people at loose ends. But the way he writes, his style, is really good.
So there is Janet Fitch! Amazing artist and amazing woman. I had a great time interviewing her and hope that you will take the time to read her novels. Yes you have to go there, but oh how it’s worth it.
Janet Fitch will be judging la.cityzine’s upcoming competition to showcase new and unpublished writers! More details to come…
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1 response so far ↓
1 Emberly Modine // Feb 10, 2008 at 11:15 am
Really interesting interview. It is so great to be able to have insight into someones process, you get this real sense of their uniqueness that can only be experienced when hearing about the mind behind the handiwork.
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