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Janet Fitch

paintitblackbook

About Me

THIS IS THE OFFICIAL JANET FITCH PAINT IT BLACK MYSPACE PAGE
100% WRITER OWNED AND OPERATED
No use of Interns, Go-Betweens, Factotums, Zombies, the Undead, Golems, Indentured Servants, Sex Slaves, Prison Camp Labor, Clones, Drones, Robots or Manpower Temps. This page was made without cruelty to animals.
Friends rotate, so don't be surprised to see your smiling smirking sullen sinister soignee solitary stubbly smudged or shocked profile up from time to time. You are all so beautiful. Forgive me if I haven't been able to comment you all, this is a little overwhelming, but I appreciate your being here and will write back when I can!
I love talking to you, but I can't read your manuscripts, stories, essays etc. I'm so glad you're writing, and saying no makes me feel like crap.
UPON EXITING, RECEIVE BLESSINGS
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ABOUT PAINT IT BLACK:
Following the huge success of White Oleander, where Janet Fitch portrayed the coming-of-age of Astrid, a young girl placed in foster care after her mother murders a former lover and goes to prison for life, she has once again created an indelible portrait of a young woman in Paint it Black. Josie Tyrell is a teenage runaway, an artist's model, and an habitué of the '80s LA punk rock scene. She is a white trash escapee from Bakersfield, having left a going nowhere life there. Now, sex, drugs and rock n' roll inform her days and nights. Paint it Black is the perfect title choice because Josie's lover is never coming back, as the song says.
Josie meets Michael Faraday, son of concert pianist Meredith Loewy and writer Calvin Faraday, long divorced. He is everything that she is not: refined, wealthy, well-traveled, brilliant by fits and starts. He is also a Harvard dropout, leaving school so he can paint; his new obsession. He refuses help from his mother, who is furious about his decision to leave school, but it doesn't bother him to have Josie working three jobs to support them. He is given to black moods, frozen in amber by his perfectionism, contemptuous of those who do not agree with him about art and life. Josie adores him. One day much like any other, he leaves their house, saying that he is going to his mother's so that he can paint in solitude. Instead, he goes to a motel in 29 Palms and shoots himself in the head.
What follows is Josie in a near fugue state from grief, drugs, and booze, going over and over her love for Michael, trying to grasp how he could do what he did. After all, didn't they share the "true world," Michael's characterization of their cocoon of love and exclusivity?
Meredith calls her and says, "Why are you alive? What is the excuse for Josie Tyrell? I ask you." Ultimately, they form a tenuous relationship, because all that is left of Michael lives in the two women. Josie even lives with Meredith for a while. When Meredith is ready to go on tour again, she asks Josie to go to Europe with her. Before she can do that, she must go to 29 Palms and try to understand, finally, why Michael's depression pushed him over the edge. That puzzle is not solved, nor can it be, but the end of the story is a hopeful, upbeat, new beginning. Janet Fitch has beaten the curse of the sophomore slump with this dynamite second novel.
From Publishers Weekly... Starred Review. Fitch follows her bestselling debut, White Oleander, by revisiting the insidious effects of a powerful, narcissistic mother on an only child. Michael Faraday is a Harvard dropout who paints in the L.A. art world of 1981; his suicide happens a few pages in, and sets the stage for a Fitch's masterful shifts in time and perspective. Josie Tyrell, an artist's model and denizen of the punk rock, had an intense relationship with Michael, but never managed to free him from his mother, renowned concert pianist Meredith Loewy, who moves in a bleak, loveless world of wealth and privilege. Yet their very different loves for Michael bring about a surprising alliance between the imperious Meredith and Josie, a white trash escapee whose inborn grace, style and sense of self sustain her—along with art, music and alcohol. The two find unexpected comfort in each other's shared loss, allowing Fitch to contrast the inner and outer resources of women whose lives couldn't be more different, and to flash back deeply into their histories. Fitch excels at painting a negative personality with sure-handed depth and fairness, and her prose penetrates the inner lives of the two with immediacy and bite. In Josie, she has created an indomitable young woman whose pluck and growing self-awareness beautifully offset Meredith's emptiness. Their relationship transforms a big cliché—the artist's suicide—into a page-turning psychodrama.
From The Library Journal...Beauty and its pretenders prowl around the edges of Fitch's long-awaited second novel. Just as she did so masterfully in White Oleander, Fitch portrays the world of a young woman who is searching for a way to live after being dealt an incredibly lousy hand. Opting for the antithesis of beauty, Josie Tyrell exists within the punk club scene of 1980s Los Angeles, and, unfortunately, she finds familiar terrain in that subculture's harshness and brutal sexuality. Not until she meets Michael Faraday, a child of affluence and privilege, does Josie know that there is such a thing as true beauty in the world. He teaches her about the beauty of the night sky; of music, art, and poetry. But his obsession becomes his undoing as he cannot find enough of this transcendent beauty to protect him from his demons. Giving in to the inescapable lure of his family's ghosts, he commits suicide. Michael was the sole source of light for Josie and his tortured, tortuous mother: now both women engage in a dangerous struggle to survive in a world of darkness. As Josie unravels the story of Michael's despair, she becomes able to move from self-destruction to self-determination. Suspenseful, compelling, and superbly crafted, this work shows Fitch once again taking the art of writing to its highest level.
Interview: My favorite interview from Drinks with Tony.
Interview: Bookburger Pop Quiz
I take the Page 99 test . Find out the results.
Interview: A new one with MindYourMind.ca********************************************* *******************************************

My Interests

I want to change you, rearrange you, turn you inside out.
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I'd like to meet:

Readers. The real hardbitten kind. The, "don't bother me, can't you see I'm reading?" type.
Writers, new and used. I'll be teaching at SQUAW VALLEY (totally awesome) COMMUNITY OF WRITERS this summer.
Artists. Poets. Dancers. Dreamers. Visionaries. Laughers, sighers, Zen woodcutters and angelheaded madmen.

Music:

Punk circa 1980, expecially LA. X, Germs, Cramps. Joan Jett. Lydia Lunch. Nina Hagen and Lena Lovich. Patti Smith inspires me,.?Nico, and Velvet Underground. Nico to me embodies absolutely the dark poignancy of Paint It Black, with songs like “These Days” and “Fairest of the Seasons.” Classical piano, especially Late Brahms piano music, the Romances and Intermezzos, really spoke to me--Brahms has a big part in Paint It Black. And the wild creepiness of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, both for the modernism and the fact that Schoenberg was an exile from Nazi dominated Europe, like the grandfather Mauritz. Also Debussy, for that out-of-time sense of a house in mourning. 1920’s dirty blues and Le Jazz Hot--The ‘golden age’ music of the book, when the characters are happy in love--. Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives, dirty blues Lucille Bogan, Big Bill Broonzy, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith.

Movies:

Ciao Manhattan and Chelsea Girls, just to see Edie Sedgwick.Last Tango in Paris One forgets, this is really the story of a suicide survivor. Sunset Boulevard. For LA Gothic feel. Billy Wilder was another exile from Nazi Europe.

Television:

Who needs TV when you have T Rex.

Books:

POEMS:
The book riffs poetry like songs. Dylan Thomas-- actually, the original title of the short story was Love in the Asylum. “Love in the Asylum,” “Altarwise by Owl-Light,” “Over Sir John’s Hill,” and “In Country Sleep."
From Anne Sexton, “Riding the Elevator into the Sky." You can't get her language out of your ears.
T.S. Eliot's a constant song--in Paint it Black there's a lot of Eliot and his end of time theme. Quotes from “Burnt Norton” also The Wasteland.
And all over the book there's the fingerprints of The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Jeanne of Montmartre, by Blaise Cendrars. It's part of the love theme of Michael and Josie.
The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde. Each man kills the thing he loves.
PROSE
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. I return to this for a certain aristocratic clarity.
The Thirteen Clocks, by James Thurber. The Dark Castle and the Duke who stops time with his cold cold hand.
Poe, especially “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Poe was my first love.
Faulkner. The existential, familial doom of The Sound and The Fury.
A history of the LA punk scene, We’ve got the Neutron Bomb by Mark Spitz and Brendan Mullen.

Heroes:

Edie Sedgwick. Patti Smith. Darby Crash. Bjork. Courtney. Kurt.

My Blog

LA TIMES FESTIVAL OF BOOKS--THE CIRCUS IS COMING TO TOWN

Every writer, every die-hard reader in LA waits for this all year long, the humongous celebration of books and writers that takes place at UCLA this weekend--from the book prizes Friday night through ...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Tue, 22 Apr 2008 02:00:00 PST

HOW DO I MAKE A LIVING? (Random Writer Question No. 4)

YOUR QUESTION:Hey Janet, I'm a senior graduating from Columbia University and I'm kind of getting freaked out now because I hate the jobs I have now and I really don't want to continue doing that afte...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Fri, 18 Apr 2008 02:15:00 PST

"What should I read?"

Some of you have asked for book recommendations. This is a totally random list--many of them books I seem to always give out and have to buy again. (I'm not including the classics because I think eve...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Wed, 05 Mar 2008 10:52:00 PST

THE PECULIAR CHARM OF OSCAR VIEWING

Why do I love the Oscars so? A few years ago, I was crushed to discover a writer's dinner I usually attend in New York unaccountably began to coincide with the glittering Event. In years before, I al...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Tue, 19 Feb 2008 10:18:00 PST

New Years Intention

After the whirlwind of last year, travel and readings for Paint It Black, trip to Russia in January, doing research for this book, new b/f, and being out a lot (which I love), I have dedicated this y...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Fri, 11 Jan 2008 11:04:00 PST

DARTH VADER BACK TO HOME PLANET

Back from a week in the northwest, at the Wordstock Festival in Portland, and then a workshop and reading in Corvallis at OSU. Definitely fun--met lots of great writers& plus I went to college in Por...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:44:00 PST

WHAT IS A SCENE? (Random Writer Question 3)

QUESTION:"How do you manage to stay on track when you're writing? - i.e. What's your strategy when it comes to having enough going on in your storyline to keep the reader hooked but not too much so th...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Thu, 27 Dec 2007 11:36:00 PST

RANDOM WRITER QUESTION 2

PART I"i'm an aspiring writer, but chose to study illustration. any suggestions for an ametuer who doesn't want to become an english comp major? any books that might offer insight into the creative pr...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Wed, 12 Dec 2007 10:52:00 PST

RANDOM WRITER QUESTION 1

Many of you are sending me your writing questions, and as I think they're of fairly wide interest, so I've decided I'm going to start answering them here on the blog, so more of you can join in the co...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Fri, 23 Nov 2007 01:08:00 PST

THE BEST WRITING ADVICE I EVER GOT

One of the questions I'm often asked is--what's the best piece of writing advice you ever got? Here's a few:1. "Write for the five smartest people you know." What this means is, don't write down. A...
Posted by Janet Fitch on Mon, 05 Nov 2007 03:08:00 PST