Artistic Journey: From book to film, 'White Oleander's' evolution is incredible ride for author
The Los Angeles native has worked as a typesetter, a journalist and an editor, and she says the road to becoming an author was a long and winding one, rooted in her voracious love of a good story.
"I was a terrible malinger when I was a kid," said Fitch. "If I could get myself to look sick enough, my parents would let me stay home from school and I'd read and watch movies all day long."
Preferring to be immersed worlds other than her own, she went on to major in history at Reed College in Portland, Ore.
"The fact that history actually happened wasn't in my mind - I just loved a good narrative," said Fitch. "Eventually I realized history wasn't where I wanted to be. I think I was always a fiction writer, I just crept in the back door."
Fitch finally made her grand entrance with "White Oleander." Two weeks after the book was published, Oprah Winfrey selected it for her book club, catapulting it to the top-five position of best seller lists of newspapers around the country.
The sudden fame was a jolt to the longtime writer's system. Her first thoughts about her story becoming a full-length motion picture (released nationwide last week) were equally jarring.
"The most I was hoping for at the beginning was for a publisher to accept the story and to get some good critical acceptance," said Fitch. "So to think of the book becoming a movie - it's so big, it's really hard for me to grasp."
"White Oleander" follows the story of teen-age Astrid (Allison Lohman), who finds herself on her own after her passionate, artist mother Ingrid (Michelle Pfeiffer) is jailed for murdering her unfaithful lover.
Chaos and tragedy never seem to loosen their grip on Astrid as she is shuttled from foster home to foster home, all the while searching for her own identity. Astrid seems fragile on the outside, but years of weathering Ingrid's unpredictable, self-absorbed behavior have already made her conscious of the manipulative world around her.
Astrid navigates her new worlds, and jail visits with her mother, with an emerging sense of herself and is eventually able to distill the poison from her mother's love and come away with what she couldn't grasp in the beginning - some sort of understanding of her mother's behavior.
What does Fitch think of the finished movie?
"I tried to write screenplays, so I knew they [the producers] would have to cut a great deal of the book," said Fitch.
She didn't have a say in the casting of the film, but she was invited to the first read-through with the actors.
"I was so thrilled to see the characters I had lived with for four years in my head come to life," said Fitch. "They made a really good movie, one that lives and breathes and walks around."
