They didn't want to walk a mile in her moccasins. People read that story and they hated my character, Ingrid. I thought, wouldn't it be interesting to take someone like that, an aesthete, which is an aristocratic position, and put them at the end of the 20th century in America, with a crummy job and a crummy apartment, having to make a living, and see what happened. But if somebody wore the wrong color combinations in their robes, then for days she just couldn't get over it, how disgusting it was. Sei Shonagon could see somebody beheaded right in front of her and it's like, pfft, there's no connection between her and that person. It was a time of tremendous refinement where the aristocrats would have a party in which they would go and look at moonlight on a pond. Of course the Heian empire didn't last very long. Soldiers were promoted by how well they wrote poetry. It was about a society based on aesthetics. She was a lady-in-waiting to the Heian empress in Japan in the 11th century.

She was actually the protagonist of a short story. Tell me about the genesis of 'White Oleander.' Salon Books spoke with Fitch at the beginning of a triumphant nationwide publicity tour for 'White Oleander,' shortly after she appeared on television with Oprah Winfrey, who made Fitch's novel the May selection for her book club. Astrid then begins a journey through a series of foster homes, in each one learning about sex, money, love, independence, courage, rage and the manifold ways of becoming a woman. When Ingrid condescends to an affair with a less than exquisite man, falls in love and then is summarily dumped, she poisons her former lover and eventually winds up in prison. In Venice Beach, mother and daughter live a peripatetic bohemian lifestyle ruled by Ingrid's rigorous idea of beauty (three white flowers in a plain glass vase is the epitome of her aesthetic) and her contempt for emotional weakness. It's the story of Astrid Magnussen, daughter of the beautiful, merciless poet, Ingrid. But 'White Oleander' itself is no fairy tale. At 43 - after 22 years of laboring away at her fiction, publishing the occasional story in small literary magazines - she has seen her first novel, 'White Oleander,' become a national bestseller. Recently, Janet Fitch's life has had an enchanted quality.

White oleander author