Paint It Black | Janet Fitch | Talks at Google

The authors team at Google is delighted to welcome Janet Fitch here today and wanted to welcome everyone from the Santa Monica office as well as hopefully our.

There we go. I'm going to turn my phone off and I suggest everyone do the same.

So I wanted to welcome both our Santa Monica office and our remote offices which are connecting now we have the Irvine office and Chicago office and hopefully we'll be set up so that you all can ask questions if you like as well. I also wanted to welcome those of you who might be viewing this on YouTube. We're going to get this video up there as soon as we can. So welcome and most of all we wanted again to welcome Janet Fitch. Thank you. Janet is the author of the bestseller White Oleander. She is a LA native author and novelist and third generation, right? Third generation LA resident. White Oleander has been translated into 24 languages and made into the 2002 film. Two 2002 film. Hollywood film by the same name of course. And her current novel which just came out in paperback this month is Paint It Black and she is here to talk about Paint It Black. Welcome Janet.

Thank you very much. Well, first I must say it's a thrill to be at Google as a writer. I use it 25, 30, 40 times a day. It's like having the Library of Alexandria on your desk in your bathrobe. I mean never before in history has so much been available to the home worker. I just wanted to share this one story. I was in San Francisco recently and I went to the Hate and a friend of mine hates for me to go to the Hate because it's. He feels that people are feeding off the decaying culture that was once very vibrant and it's just a bunch of T shirt shops. So I made sure to stop in at the Anarchist bookstore because that's, you know, he approved of that. But they were talking about the Internet and they are great believers that the Internet is the greatest proof that anarchy works. And if you think about it, it really does. But it also filters through Google because otherwise it would just be a featureless mangrove swamp. But you guys supply the navigation which we all super appreciate. So I'm here to read you a little bit of my book Paint It Black which is set in 1980 punk rock LA. It's. Technical difficulties. Hello? Can they hear?

They can now.

Hey, hey. It's a novel set in 1980 punk rock LA. And it's about a 19 year old art model named Josie Tyrell who has fallen in love with an art student who. This is not Giving anything away. He shows up a suicide in the first chapter. And he was a very influential person in her life. She was someone who. She's an art model, she's a body. And this boy saw something in her that nobody else had ever seen, saw curiosity, saw intelligence, saw, you know, a certain kind of grace, and gave that back to her the way somebody who's influential in your life can do. So when he shows up dead, suicide, she has to figure out is what he gave her. Is what he gave her hers, or did he take it with him when he committed suicide? And complicating matters is his mother, Meredith, who is a very cultured woman concert pianist, who hated this girl from the word go and now blames her for the suicide because it happened on her watch. And the women really dislike each other, but on the other hand, they're drawn to each other as well, because each of them has a piece of him that the other person didn't know. So there's this repulsion and attraction that goes on between these two women. So that's another major strand of the book. So I thought I'd read a little bit from the book. The suicide takes place during the week that John Lennon was shot. 1980, Christmas, 1980, and two days before a major figure in LA punk scene, which is, I guess, a very small scene to have a major figure. But Darby Crash committed suicide. So this is the third death at that time, which is a very dark time. And what I'm going to read is Christmas Eve, it's a week after the funeral, and she is driving around. It takes place in two neighborhoods in Los Angeles which are almost side by side. Echo park and Los Feliz. Echo park is a working class neighborhood, a lot of art students, a lot of punk rockers. You know, nobody's going to complain about the dead car on your front lawn. Nobody's going to care about loud music at all hours. That's where Josie and Michael lived. And then his mother lived in Los Feliz, which is maybe two miles away. It's an old neighborhood where silent stars lived. It has a haunted feel. It's hills, but it's very private. It's not like Beverly Hills, where every. Everything's out in the open. It's very private, it's windy, the streets are dark. It's a very mysterious neighborhood. It kind of has a haunted feel for me. So this is where I have the mother living, and this is where the boy grew up. So here's Josie, my punk rock heroine, driving on Christmas Eve, a week after they buried her boyfriend. She didn't want a Holly Jolly. She didn't want a Very Merry or a Felice Navidad. It was only 8 o' clock and she had the whole night to get through. All over the city people were sitting down to turkey dinners and trimming trees and schlogging eggnog till they puked. She threaded her raw mufflered Falcon up and down the hills and drops of Echo Park, a silver lake and Angeleno Heights, drinking and avoiding the house behind the house on Lemoyne street where no one lived anymore, listening to a germs tape on the tinny car stereo. They were doing We Must Bleed. She should have gone down to Fullerton with Penn and Shirley and Paul to the Black Flag show, but that scene was getting so ugly. Phil Baby invited her to a party at his place. It sounded like death on a TV tray, a bunch of art teachers in horn rim glasses getting swacked on hot wine with cinnamon sticks. There was nowhere she wanted to be, nothing to do but get blasted and drive around until her gas ran out. She cruised Sunset, the family strolling along the broad sidewalks, the stores all decorated, windows spray painted with snow and cartoon Santas. Felice Navidad. She stopped at the Chinese market. The parking lot was jammed, people buying their last minute fish and sponge cake. She pushed a cart around for a while, banging into people in the fluorescent light down the long cold rows of vegetables and fruit. She decided to buy a weird huge fruit that looked like a porcupine. It weighed about 20 pounds and smelled like armpits. Michael would do something like that. There was no trace of Holly jolly in here. God bless the Chinese men with huge cleavers, hacked up chickens and hunks of pork behind the butcher case, without a shred of tinsel or a single Santa hat, two tiny withered grandmas stood over a metal sink full of little blue crabs scrambling over each other in a hopeless bid for escape. Maybe that was God peering over the edge of the sink as you tried to claw your way out, picking off this one and that one. She carried her purchases out to the car. Some of the bean cake Michael liked and the stinking porcupine fruit started driving again, the half pint of vodka between her knees. Don't do this at home. She couldn't shake the feeling that any minute she would see him walking along with his hands in the pockets of his tweed jacket, the collar up striped knitted scarf around his neck, there by the newsstand or there in front of Senor Reynaldo's Escuela de Valle. The Pioneer Market lot still bristled with unsold Christmas trees. They had bought their own tree here exactly 12 months ago. She could see them walking together, arm in arm, the tall rumpled haired boy in the tweed coat, collar raised against the cold, the girl in the yellow coat with the bleached hair, laughing, spying on people, guessing who they could be, making up stories. The only Christmas they would ever have, driving home with the tree tied to the roof of the Falcon like a dead deer carrying it down the steep steps. They sat up all night making decorations for it, Michael twisting up an entire circus from pipe cleaners. She pulled into the parking lot, parked sloppily, trying to see through tears that stung like bleach. They had been happy. They had been. She got out and pushed her way between the trees, blindly brushing their sticky needles with her hands, the smell overpowering, clinging to her arms. She wanted him desperately, fiercely, she wanted him back right now. She didn't think she could live one more moment. Miss? A pimply faced box boy boy was peering at her through the branches. Miss, are you all right? Do I look all right to you? She said, clutching at pine branches, her hands smelling of pitch pine and loss. Do I look all right? All along Sunset, telephone poles and boarded up windows were pasted thick with advertisements for Club Bahia Chicho Montoya y Gloria Nunez Salvado Nueve de Decembre Ocho PM La Laguna Azul con Brooke Shields. A stoic young man in a hooded sweatshirt sold oranges at the corner at Alvarado. He would have to sell them all before he could go home. Probably just a room, hot bedded with three other migrants in Pico Union. No better Navidad than hers she was. She rolled down her window and held out two bucks. He brought the sack over, a small corpse in his arms. She passed the money through and took the weight from him. She could smell it, saffron over sour green. It smelled better than the stink fruit in the back. She threw it on the passenger seat and tore open the bag, peeled one on the steering wheel as she drove. The rind was thick, the orange smaller than it should have been, cold and sour, but she ate it anyway, knowing somewhere there was a place where the oranges would be allowed to ripen all the way. They would fall off the trees before they were picked. They were so ripe the smell was only a promise. That's where they should have moved. Somewhere things were allowed to ripen all the way. Oranges. There would be Sweet as kisses in paradise. So she's driving and she ends up going with where she shouldn't be going. Blasting the germ. Blasting the germs. Half of LA crawled along Las Feliz Boulevard, gawking at mansions decked in vast seas of light, sucking up more power than a village could use in a year, each one trying to outdo its neighbor. It was disgusting. It was not the true world, not the same as the small houses with their lights. Just waste and arrogance. She opened her window so they could hear what the germs thought of them. She turned up a side street bore right and climbed. She knew where she was going, the last place she should. It was as if the car was going there of its own accord. Light emanated from the big houses, windows blazing. You could see into them like doll houses. Why didn't they pull their curtains? If it was up to to her, she would install thick velvet drapes. No one would be able to look inside. How supremely confident you'd have to be to show off like that when there were people in this city who would kill you for a leather jacket. Here was a Christmas tree, must be 14ft high. That one had a fireplace and lights reflecting in a tall gold leaf mirror. One was having a party. There was a wreath on the door and people were arriving, their arms laden. She drove higher until the lights all disappeared. No more Christmas trees or fireplaces or white living rooms. She turned down the tape, finally turned it off. Now the houses retreated behind high walls and hedges. She recognized the gate, the Spanish house at the top of the drive via Paloma. Only the living room window was lit, obscured but not completely hidden by the big deodar cedar. Josie pulled over and parked opposite the lacy ironwork gate. Here was the hugeness and the darkness. She wanted the mushroom softness of the old stucco wall and the moldering sadness of the place, its abandonment, its smell of cedar and pitisporum. It was as if she. She had been circling this house since Michael died, moving in tighter and tighter orbits around this epicenter. She rolled down the window to the cold, breathed in the night's wintry freshness. There could be a frost. The stars bristled in the sky like white flecks on a black enameled roasting pan. A piano started, then stopped, started again. The same phrase over and over and over. She peeled another orange, throwing the peel out the window that she left, rolled down for the fragrance of the pines and the music. You would not know it was Christmas up here. This house in its dignified Morning was out of reach of all festivity, any hope of salvation from behind the palms and the spiky yuccas and the funereal cedars. The piano repeated the phrase like a bad conscience playing in your head. Thank you. So I thought what I would do is, instead of lecturing, I thought I would answer questions because it's much more interesting than listening to myself talk. I've heard myself talk. It's not as interesting as answering questions. Ask me anything. I'll talk about writing. I'll talk about life, love, and the pursuit of happiness.

It's sort of the obvious question, but the research that you did for the.

Setting and how did you create play?

How much of it was out of memory and how much were you actually going and sort of digging up? I don't know, whatever it might be.

Well, for this book, I was there during the poetry punk rock era. That's when I sort of was a struggling writer myself. So I knew these neighborhoods. But I always go and drive around and find specific houses and sit out in front and look at them and get details, because that's what makes it alive for the reader is the little details. Like a bird that sounds like a squeaky wheel, you know? And unless you're there, you don't pick up those details because you're sitting there in a room by yourself with walls and, you know, your laptop.

What was the detail you said it smelled? The smell of cedar.

And loss.

And what?

And loss. Oh, and loss. Okay. Yeah. It's.

They had a saying about driving.

Going to.

When you wrote this novel and went away into it, where did you go to write? Did you go somewhere? Did you write a poem? And how long did it take you to write each novel?

Janet, can you actually repeat the question?

Yeah. The question was, when. Where do I write? And, you know, do I go somewhere? Or how do I do it? I work at home. I really need to hold a vision of something inside my head. So to go and work in a cafe doesn't work for me because it's too distracting. I need to invent a world and hold it into my. Hold it in my head. So I work at home, But I do go out and take notes, you know, and come back and use. On.

Do you base your characters on kind of people that you've met in your life or. I mean, yeah, these characters seem really particular. I feel like I might have had some of these people before, and they just.

They.

Heck, they have their nuances and everything. Do you base that on almost like a composite of People you've met, or how do you come up with such dilemmas?

Okay, so this is a question of where do the characters come from? Are they imagined or are they people that I've known? Often the exterior of the characters will be someone I know or a composite of people I know. But in writing, for me, it's like a dream. And you know, in dreams, everyone is you. They all are a piece of you. And so I'd say, what fill the story stuffing of the characters, what's inside of them are pieces of myself. The major characters, especially minor characters, are often people I know, but the major characters are usually me. Different aspects, because that's how you write is you take things that bother you, things or traits about yourself, and you give them to different people and then you let them interact. So you. It's like a dream where you're figuring out, I don't know what I think about anything until I write about it.

Probably following up on that, what was your mission modification of writing? Was it the general theme of learning something about myself for another, or that general scheme between the mother and the attraction compulsion cream? Was it themes or was it that you actually wanted to work something about the scene?

Ah. What was my initial impulse to write the book? I had written a short story that was almost like a Persona, Bergman's Persona kind of tale where about a girl whose boyfriend has committed suicide and she goes to the house where his mother lives. And in the course of the story, she becomes comes the boy for her mother, for his mother. And it was like, you knew she was never going to leave that house, ever. It was very dark. Poe was one of my early influences, and I always liked that story. And I had something that I had been working on that just wasn't coming together. And I was feeling very low about my abilities and a life in general. You know, I was kind of in a very dark place myself, and I remembered that story and it just suited where I was so much. And it deals a lot with artistic issues of permission and perfection. The mother is a concert pianist, and she. Her philosophy is, there's no room for mediocre concert pianist. There are too many geniuses. And Josie is a punk rocker and punk rock is diy. You know, just do it yourself, do it. You want to do it, do it. You know, there's a famous story about Lenny Kaye, who's Patti Smith's guitarist, and he had been a rock critic and he was interviewing somebody in one of the punk bands, guitarist and say, God, I would just give anything to Be a rock guitarist, you know. And the guy says, well, why don't you? And Lenny says, well, because I don't know how to play the guitar. And the guy says, well, I don't either, you know. So Lenny gave it a try and you know, he became a very good guitarist. But it's that permission you give yourself permission to be lousy. And every artist has these two things in them. The perfectionism. You want to be great, you want it to be, you know, sublime, which wars with your inability. You know, when you make those kind of demands on yourself, you get a lot of writer's block, you get a lot of artistic blocks. The insecurity is intense. Whereas diy, it's like just make a mark, just, just do something. So, you know, this is working out my own artistic issues. I think that that had a big part.

I can't sort of imagine anything more.

Difficult to write a narrative story about.

Than grief because it doesn't go forward by its sort of very nature, something you're sort of working through. I was wondering if it was really difficult to write. You know, it's the same sort of going grief as something that still moved forward action wise. And how you end up choosing that subject.

Oh, well, I think loss as the question is, why did I pick this subject? And was it difficult to sustain a novel about somebody's movement through their grief? I think loss is like the rock bottom of the, of the human condition. I think to live is to experience loss, you know, unless you're four years old. Loss is the constant and it's how we deal with grief that really is. A lot of our humanity is tied up in that. Do we deny it? Do we just like get over it? You know, suck it up, get over it? Or do we get lost in it? Does it embitter our entire experience? Do we seek out others? Do we decide we're not going to seek out others because the danger of loss is too great? You know, how does loss affect us? And grief is, especially after a suicide, it's the worst one because these people chose to do it. So there's a, a real load of anger when somebody commits suicide. And it's also contagious. Suicide. You know, like they show it runs in families. Michael, his grandfather was a suicide, Meredith's father. It's this horrific gift that keeps on giving because it's like saying, I've had enough of my depression. Here, you take it. You know, it's a really diabolical thing. And so Josie is fighting that load that Michael has handed her. And I find it, you know, it's not a situation that we want to have in real life, but we do encounter aspects of this everyone. And so I'm very attracted to work on it. And I think the movement is all in fiction in general. The movement is within the character as they fight through layers of their feelings. You know, it's not one note. I mean, the grief after, especially after suicide. I mean, it's. There's rage, there's moments of surreal humor. It's. How do you. Do you pretend it doesn't exist? Do you try to go on? Do you drown your sorrows? How do you cope with it? And I think it's such a common place where people end up there. Everybody ends up there.

So when you sit down to write a story like this, how much of it in your head? I'm just curious about the general approach. Do you have the story you can imagine out in your head and some of the high level character development and where all that goes? Or does it just start with an idea and it just sort of grows organically?

When I first start, the question is, how do I approach writing a novel? Am I methodical, logical? Do I plan it out? What do I know about it? When I started writing, I read books about how. How to write. And the book said, oh, you plot the whole thing out and you put it on cards on a blackboard or on a bulletin board. And then you take off the first card. Oh, I'll write that. And then I write this. And then by the time I've written them all, I've got a book. And I found that once I tried it and once I'd written like the first three note cards, I was already bored because I knew the whole novel and I wasn't interested because there was no discovery. So I go in not knowing because what I'm interested in, I want to know what's in there. I don't know what's in there. That's the investigation. That's what interests me about it. So usually I start with a situation that's highly charged, that has an energy of its own, like a clock or spring that's been wound up. And then you can set it loose and see where it goes.

So did you know how this was going to end before it actually ended?

No, I didn't know how it was going to end. I didn't know. I knew because of the short story. I knew that there was going to be some attraction to the idea of becoming him for his mother. I knew that was Going to be an allure for her. But I didn't know. I didn't even know her. I didn't really know her life. So it's like you don't know what's in there until you start pulling stuff up. So I kind of. My method is like groping around in the dark and then falling over things.

It's come to a logical conclusion at some point.

Yeah, you fight your way to the point. Because the difference between art and life is that life is like a big shaggy dog story. You know, life, there's no shape to life, there's no point to life. It's one thing after another. Whereas in art you get to fashion, meaning you get to shape it. And you're always looking for what does this mean? What is this really about? And until you. Sometimes it's a second draft or third draft of the whole thing before I know what this is about. And then you're looking for. I like an end. I don't like books that just end, you know, I like a book that closes like a drawstring on a bag. I want it to really close. So I rewrote the ending of this umpteen million times just to try to get it just right.

So, Janet, I think maybe this is a good follow up question or something I've been thinking about. So in terms of art, there's two prominent arts in this novel, the visual arts and music. And how do these work within Josie's work? Like, what do they permit for her and how do they differ?

So, yeah, the two art forms that are in the book, visual art. Michael's a visual artist, she's an art model. And music, both punk music. And the mother is a concert pianist. So we get concert, we get classical music as well. And to me, they represent. In our society it's high and low culture. One is a rejection of high culture as a rejection of expectations. It's a rejection of perfectionism. It's a rejection of the man. It's a rejection of having to pass, you know, pass somebody's Good Housekeeping seal of approval. That's punk rock. You know, classical music is high culture. It's history, it's Europe. There's a, you know, the grandfather came here from Nazi Germany ahead of the Nazis, and was eventually a suicide. Never quite was free from that. Classical music is high expectation. There's no room for anything but genius. And so the conversation between the two is it represents a lot of the action in the book. And visual art is. It was a way of Michael, he had Been going to Harvard. He was a dropout. He had been going to Harvard as an art history student, and he was being groomed to be an art critic. But it's like the Lenny Kaye story. He wanted to play the guitar, and his mother was saying, no, no, there are too many geniuses. There's no room for you. And he's finally with some girl who says, yeah, yeah, just do it. I think you're great. You know, so it's him trying to bring the permission and the perfectionism together, and it wars within him. I think of all the characters, that's the one that I identify most. Michael.

How many drafts did he do in her long.

I do. I'm a draft writer. So what I do is I write not only full drafts, but the way I write is every day to start the day I rewrite what I wrote the day before. And that's how I kind of break it loose, warm it up. And sometimes I'll go back two days or three days and continue. So every piece of it has gone over, you know, countless times. And I'll have written maybe three drafts, complete drafts, maybe four. So it's. This was, like, took me about four years.

Just follow up on the draft. Do you keep your drafts?

I keep everything. I am, like, the biggest pack rat known to man, I have. I talk to the woman who's the archivist at the Huntington Library, and she said, keep everything. Keep everything. So I put them in boxes in garbage bags and put them under the house. So, you know, if anybody cares to ever see these, you know, Laptop. Laptop. Oh, I was the first computer, the first portable computer, the Osborne. I had an Osborne. You know, it was like a sewing machine, you know, where the lid came off this way, and Wordstar. So I was one of the very first. I was one of the very first, you know, portable. I was waiting for the laptop, but I didn't know it, you know, So I always write on computer. I have the worst handwriting in the world. And, you know, I like the. It used to be cut and paste, really was cut and paste. You typed, and then you cut it, and then you stuck in the new stuff and you taped it. So the galley, you know, your final draft would have, like, pages of different lengths, and you'd think twice about re. About doing another draft because you'd have to type the whole thing all over again. So the computer for my process is, like, absolutely essential. And then you had one. Yeah, Yeah.

I was just curious about bringing back.

To your other novel.

I just wanted to see how you.

Felt about your characters, seeing them on screen? What's that like? Okay, this is a question of how did I feel about the movie and seeing my characters walking around. It was surreal, real beyond belief. I got to go onto some of the sets of the movie and to see something, it's like a dream where you, you, you have a dream, you're in your parents house and. But it's not quite right. It's not really your parents house but you know, it is. It was like that walking onto those sets and seeing, you know, it's not, that's not how I saw it, but I know that that's what it is. It was absolutely surreal. I did not have any say in the casting, but the way I looked at the whole film experience was like. They say, you know, a painter paints a painting after another painting. So you know, Van Gogh paints a painting after Courbet. He takes a Courbet painting and then he paints a painting based on it. Well, Courbet doesn't go, well, that's not what I had in mind because he already painted what he had in mind. This is Van Gogh's work and that's how I felt about the movie. You know, this is what, this is their work of art.

How did you feel about the adaptation process? Especially because the ending was changed. Was that difficult?

How do I feel about the adaptation process? Let me tell you, I never met the screenwriter, you know, that's the person who does not want to meet the novelist, you know. So I felt it was good, I mean, to take a 400 page novel that's not particularly linear and make a two hour movie out of it. I mean, I couldn't have done that. So I thought, you know, I was pretty, pretty impressed.

I was just going back to the technology issue, which is that I met a lot of artists who use Google constantly as they're writing. I was just curious how it works in your process.

I use Google constantly. You know, it's like if I. It used to be things that you'd make a list of all the things, the little details that I'm very obsessional and most novelists are if we need to know something, we can't get over it. Even if it's like I'm working on something now that's set in 1923 and it's like, how did phones work, pay phones work in 1923? How much were they? What did they look like? Where did you put, did they have them? Where did you put the money? You know, and boy, you know, so you go on Google, it's like, I gotta see what that phone looks like. And you dig around and finally you do find the phone. So I'm using it constantly as a follow up.

I don't know what time period you were writing your first novel. I don't know if Google was something you would have been able to use. But I'm always curious what people did before that.

You went to the library. You went to the library, you made phone calls, you called people who knew things, you called people who would know somebody, who might know somebody, who might know somebody. You know, you put up flyers, you know, took out ads in the weekly, you know, it was. And then some things you just let go, you know, whereas you don't have to let anything go now.

Just kind of different topic. Just what are some of your favorite contemporary authors today and have you met them?

Do they influence your work?

Can you speak about that?

Oh, my favorite contemporary authors. So many. You know, I love Mary Gaitskill, you know, I like, you know, T.C. boyle, I like Anne Carson, she's a wonderful poet. I read a lot of poetry. But as far as being influenced, it's often not your favorite writers who influence you, except for the ones that affected you growing up. I mean, growing up. I'm a Tai chi practitioner. So in Tai chi we talk about our lineage masters. And my lineage masters would be Ho and Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Joyce Carol Oates. So I'd probably come up through that strand of American literature. Henry Miller on Ice Nin, my old teacher Kate Baberman. I like music in the language. That's what affects me the most. But often the person who does something for your work is often not somebody that you particularly like. But even something that irritates you or that's difficult gives you more ideas than something that goes down easily.

Talk a little bit about your journey as a writer up until the point.

You got White Oleander published. Oh, what a long, uh huh. What a long, strange trip it was. Process to publication of White Oleander. I wrote my first short story when I was 9. I had a teacher who hated me, hated me. I didn't know why. I know now, but at the time, as a kid, it was a mystery and I wanted her to like me. So I wrote a short story, illustrated using, using my two strongest influences, Poe and Marguerite Henry, who wrote all the horse stories, Misty of Chincoteague and whatever. So Diamond Horse of Mystery. And I illustrated and I gave it to her and she took a red marker and she gave it a good going over and gave it back to me. So I didn't write again until I was 21. I read, but I just, I was a voracious, you know, I lived in my books. You know, reality sucked. You know, you're a little kid, you can't go anywhere, nobody listens to you. You have to do all this stuff and, you know, who wants that? So I lived in my books, you know, I could be James Bond, I could be a serial killer, you know, So I was very into that. And. But the books that they gave you in junior high when you were a girl, when I was growing up were like, they didn't have YA books in those days. They gave girls books like Cherry Ames, student nurse, you know, it's like Cherry Ames, you know, here I am, desperately unhappy seventh grader, you know, getting whacked around the halls in John Burroughs Junior High. And they're giving me, you know, Crest D. Delahanty. And I went to the library with my father. He used to take me to the library. He was an engineer, but he was a great reader. And he would take me to the library every two weeks and I'd hold my arms out like this and he would stack, he'd say, have you read this? Have you read this? Have you read this? Stack them up. And I'd take them home and, you know, and I remember he took me to the library and he put Crime in Punishment into my arms, my junior high arms. It was like, there's my world, you know, my desperate, unhappy, wanting to kill somebody world. And I just became enamored with that dark, sort of dark corners of human existence. And I didn't know that I was going to be a writer until. Until my senior year in college. I was going to become an historian. So I learned a lot about writing from writing history because it's all character and drama and you learn how to bring the reader in and create a world. And it wasn't until I was 21 that I realized, oh, you know what, I don't really want to write history. I really want to write, you know, I want to write stories. So I decided when I was 21 that I wanted to write. And then I got out of college, history major. The only thing I knew how to do was read and spell. So I got a job as a proofreader and I got job and then I became a typesetter and did manpower 10th and all that stuff. And I started writing. I didn't know what I was doing. I was writing three page short stories that were pretty terrible and I told people I was a writer before I'd ever written anything. I wanted to do that. And it was, you know, again, those stupid books. They say, send your stories to the places you read. So I was sending these like pathetic three page short stories to the New Yorker, you know, to the Atlantic Monthly. I didn't know, I didn't know any writers. I had no idea. So it took me a long time. I took classes at Extension, you know, read books, just picked stuff up, read the Paris Review, interviews with writers, wonderful source material, and just, you know, gradually learned to write. It took me 10 years to sell my first for a short story. I was getting rejections every week in the mail. They, at nursery school, they had circle time and they went around the circle. My daughter's nursery school, they went around the circle and said, what do you get in the mail, Johnny? You know, and, you know, one kid would say, oh, we get a catalog. And another kid would say, oh, we get a letter from grandma. And I wasn't there. But evidently my kids said, oh, we get rejections. So I mean, she lived with this. You know, this was not a fun thing. But over time, you know, I gradually learned how to write. So I don't believe that writing is something you're born to do. You know, nobody thinks that artists are born artists. They learn, they take classes. Why do people think writers don't form up the same way? So I had to learn. And it took me 10 years to sell my first short story. And it took me, and it was 20 years before white Oleander sold. So I had to do everything the wrong way. You know, it's just my nature.

Just wanted to give our distributed office a chance.

Yeah, absolutely.

I don't know if they have questions. Does our distributed office have any questions they'd like to ask? Maybe not.

See if they can turn the mic on our questions. But we're looking forward to the book. Well, thank you. I hope you enjoy it.

Thank you for coming.

Sure. What a pleasure. Here's one.

I have a question about how you got to USC and teach a writing class there.

How did I start teaching? I started teaching. It was word of mouth. Before White Oleander was published, people knew that I was pretty good at reading people's manuscripts. And I do that. I read manuscripts and people knew I was pretty good at it. And I had a. Somebody I'd worked with ran a little writing center in San Diego and asked me to come down and teach a class and I liked it and I taught for her a couple of times. So I taught at UCLA Extension. I did some classes and I taught at Pomona. I was a fellow there for a semester, Pomona College. And I had a student who had gone. Gone to the USC program and had recommended me a number of times to her, to the faculty chairman in that department. And he had been asking me for a long time, but I had never been able to have the time to do it. And now finally works better. I had been teaching in my house. Then you have to vacuum and clean up and stuff. It's much better to go somewhere and teach that way. And I love teaching. It's the opposite of writing, because writing is very instinctual. It's all about keeping your ideas out of it, keeping plans out of it, keeping intentions out of it, and really just seeing what comes up. Just seeing what comes up. Whereas teaching is the opposite. It's analytical. It's taking something that exists and going through it and seeing what it needs and then being able to express that to another person. So I like it. So I use both sides of my head. It works for me really well. Anything else? Oh, here's one.

Is there a fear of influence in terms of how they inform your writing?

Okay, the question is, if you read while you're writing, are you afraid that you're going to be influenced by what you're reading? And it's more that you see, seek to read certain things when you're writing, you're looking for something. I'm the world's most restless writer. I mean, obviously I'm reading somebody's manuscript. I'm getting paid for that, so I'm just going to read it. But reading for my own pleasure, I start and I start a lot of books and go, oh, not that, not that, not that. It's like people who eat dirt. You know, at Pica, it's called pica. It's a disease where they eat dirt, they eat paste, you know, they eat inedible substances. It's because the body craves a certain kind of mineral and it's looking for something. And that's the way I read. I'm looking for something. And it's just like, it could be the most wonderful book in the world, but it leaves me cold. If I read 10 pages, 15, 20, you know, it doesn't do anything for. It's like, like, no, not that, not that. And then I come across something that's like, oh, yeah, that's it, you know, Or I'll reread something that I know is it. You know, I can return to that over and over again.

I'm sort of.

Trying to find a question, but it's. You talked about life being sort of this meandering, shaggy dog story with no real sort of. And it sounds like from when you're.

Talking about your childhood, that there were.

Periods of time when you felt very trapped and written.

And so I'm wondering, what has your.

Writing taught you about yourself or do you even think about it in that way?

Oh, yeah.

Do you use it to sort of seek shape to your life, which that sort of has no shape?

Yeah, that's such an interesting question, is what is my writing doing for me, you know, kind of on the psychological level. Do I get insights? Do I shape my life with my writing? And in a sense, no, because I live a very conventional life. You know, it's sort of regular, you know, kind of unexciting life. But it is so helpful for me psychologically. I have seen so much about what I really think about stuff. You know, like, I worked on a book about a mother and a daughter in a very, very difficult relationship. Well, I had never had to ask myself, really and consciously, what is a good parent? What is a bad parent? And I had a child at the time, small child. I still have one, but, you know, she's a small child at the time, you know, like, what makes a bad parent? And I realized parenting is like a dance. You dance with the kid. Sometimes you need more time, sometimes the kid needs more time. You know, you can't give any. Any child 100% of your time and attention, which is what they want. So it's always a dance. Who needs what? When a bad parent doesn't dance with the kid? A bad parent is. I mean, a good parent looks at a child and goes, who are you and what do you need from me? A bad parent says, this is what I want you to be. Be. Here's what I want from you, and this is who you're going to be. I would never have understood that. And it shaped my own parenting once I worked on that book. So it does have an effect on me. The issue of perfectionism and permission continues to have an effect on me. So Annie did. Dillard is a wonderful writer. She wrote a book called Living by Fiction. And she said, talking about writing, she said, the self is the bearer of the paint box, of its inherited contents, of obsessions and fascinations. That's what we are as artists. Our contents are just what bother us, what we're interested in, what we worry about, and that's the colors that we paint with and. And once you start handling that material. Yeah, it comes back and you start sorting out your own stuff. So it does have a reflexive effect. Interesting question. There's one in the back.

This is a question that a very matter of showing. Over the last years, a lot of social communities have seen both proliferation, education and discrimination. Now, our job, software developers you're using interact with a lot of people. Do you use anything like that? Maybe boards or forums or any other means besides emailing you to get feedback on your stories? Or is it just consumption of magazines?

Where do I get my feedback on my work? Do I use a social organization to. To work with my ideas and stuff? I do it the old fashioned way. I have a writers group, local. We meet and we meet every week, all published writers and we talk about our work and it's like, you know, I love these people and I depend on them, but I know people who live in remote areas far distant from one another, have met at a writer's conference or something and they work online. So yeah, the need for community is absolutely there. I know very few writers who don't have someone giving them feedback. You know, sometimes they're embarrassed to admit it. It's like, oh yeah, I'm the, you know, I'm the full blown genius, you know, but even that guy woman is usually not telling the full story. Well, thank you very much.