作者Janet Fitch简介 英文版

　　内容简介

　　Astrid Magnussen is a twelve year old girl living in Hollywood, California. She and her mother, poet Ingrid Magnussen, live a solitary life with little outside influence. Ingrid left her husband, Klaus Anders, before Astrid was old enough to remember him and forbade him to contact Astrid after they left. Astrid relies solely on Ingrid and has trouble fitting in at school. However, Ingrid is self-centered, cold-hearted and eccentric. She lives by a set of her own rules and shows little interest in Astrid, sometimes seeming to forget she has a daughter at all. As a result, Astrid fears abandonment above all else.

　　Ingrid begins dating a man named Barry Kolker. At first Ingrid is disgusted by his vulgarity and finds him repulsive. Barry continues to woo her and Astrid watches her mother break every self-imposed rule as she becomes more involved with him. Eventually he"s revealed as a womanizer, leaving Ingrid shattered and enraged. Numerous attempts at reconciliation leave Ingrid more and more humiliated and culminate with her breaking into Barry"s house and spreading a mixture of DMSO, an arthritis drug, and oleander sap all over the surfaces of Barry"s home. The DMSO allows the oleander poison to be absorbed into skin, ostensibly killing Barry. She is eventually charged with his murder and sentenced to life in prison. She promises her daughter that she will come back, but Astrid is sent to a series of foster homes.

　　The first foster family is that of Starr, a former stripper, drug addict, and alcoholic. She has two children of her own, as well as two other foster children. Starr takes in foster children because her own children were in foster care at one time due to her addictions. Despite the fact that he is nearly fifty years old, Astrid has an affair with Starr"s boyfriend, Ray. As Ray becomes more and more disinterested in Starr, she relapses. One night, after a loud, drunken argument with Ray over his relationship with Astrid, Starr shoots Astrid with a .38. Astrid suffers some broken bones and stitches from the gunshots and is hospitalized for a few weeks.

　　Her next home is with the Turlocks. Ed and Marvel are the parents of a toddler. In their home, Astrid becomes an unpaid babysitter. Astrid befriends the Turlocks" next-door neighbor, a beautiful African-American woman named Olivia Johnstone. Astrid admires Olivia"s beauty, wealth and hedonistic lifestyle. Olivia is a prostitute by profession and is hated by the Turlock family. After befriending Olivia, Astrid begins using drugs and performing oral sex on a boy in a park in exchange for some pot. Olivia teaches Astrid about all of the finer things in life. On her fifteenth birthday, Astrid goes for a walk, and is bitten by a pack of dogs, leaving scars on her arms and face. During the winter break, Astrid is expelled from the Turlock household after accidentally falling asleep at Olivia"s house one night.

　　Next, Astrid is sent to the home of a Hispanic woman named Amelia Ramos. Amelia is an interior designer, originally from Argentina, and lives in Hollywood, with a huge, elegant house. Amelia has a son, but he has AIDS and the girls do not see him much. The other foster girls in the house are all Latino. All the girls in Amelia"s household, however, are treated the same in that they are fed dinner, but Amelia keeps a lock on her fridge so the girls starve in the mornings. Astrid starves to the point that she stops menstruating. She resorts to eating unfinished lunches from the garbage at school. Astrid eventually gets a new caseworker who finds her a new placement.

　　Astrid is taken in by a former actress named Claire Richards, and her husband, Ron. Claire does everything she can to ensure Astrid"s comfort. For once, Astrid is doing well in school and pursuing art. Astrid continues corresponding with her mother in prison, but Astrid becomes increasingly bitter towards Ingrid. Claire suspects that Ron is having an affair, and Astrid watches their fights worsen as Ron makes constant trips away from home. After New Years, Claire commits suicide by overdosing.

　　Astrid is then placed in MacLaren Children"s Center (known as Mac), which is known as a final resort for foster kids without a placement. Astrid meets a boy named Paul Trout, and they bond through the shared experience of living in foster care.

　　Astrid"s final home is with Russian immigrant Rena Grushenka. She intentionally chooses Rena over better prospective foster parents because she is devastated by Claire"s death, and does not want to become part of a nuclear family. Astrid is afraid it would be too easy to forget the pain she has gone through. At Rena"s, she lives with two other teenage girls named Niki and a pregnant girl named Yvonne. Astrid becomes very close friends with Niki and Yvonne and has sex with Rena"s boyfriend Sergei, one night after getting high on acid with Niki, Astrid begins to have memories of a woman named Annie.

　　Meanwhile, Ingrid has begun to build up a following of fans and admirers from prison, who all believe she is innocent. Ingrid and her lawyer begin to build up a case to get Ingrid released from prison. However, their case depends on Astrid — if she testifies that Ingrid did not murder Barry, Ingrid could probably get out, but if she testifies the truth, Ingrid could not win her case. Astrid realizes that she is in a position of power over her mother, and tells her that unless she answers some of her questions, she will testify against her. Astrid asks Ingrid about her father and Barry and then Annie, Ingrid is shattered to learn that Astrid remembers Annie at all, and tells Astrid that Annie was a babysitter who Ingrid left Astrid with for over a year, making Astrid realise why she fears abandonment from her mother. Astrid lets Ingrid know how damaged she is because of what Ingrid did to her, even going as far as becoming completely gothic, Astrid gives Ingrid a choice, to have her testify or to have her return to the person her mother knew her as. Astrid ends up not testifying in the case.

　　Two years later, Astrid is 20 years old and living with Paul in a run down flat in Berlin, Germany. Astrid has spent a lot of her time and effort into buying suitcases and making them into artwork detailing the journey Astrid has taken from her mothers imprisonment to her life with Rena. One afternoon Paul brings home a newspaper article reporting Ingrid"s release from prison after winning her appeals trial. Astrid acknowledges the power that her mother still has over her and even reveals her secret dream of going back to California. She never fulfills this dream, knowing that too much has happened and she would never fit into the daughter mold her mother wants from her. She also realizes that if she returns to California, she must abandon Paul, leaving him much like she has been abandoned so many times before. She embraces the life she has lived, the past that has made her who she is and accepts her mother"s love, but continues to live the life she leads.

　　作者简介：

　　Janet Fitch (born 1955) is most famously known as the author of the Oprah"s Book Club novel White Oleander, which became a film in 2002. She is a graduate of Reed College, located in Portland, Oregon.

　　Janet Fitch was born in Los Angeles, a third-generation native, and grew up in a family of voracious readers. As an undergraduate at Reed College, Fitch had decided to become an historian, attracted to its powerful narratives, the scope of events, the colossal personalities, and the potency and breadth of its themes. But when she won a student exchange to Keele University in England, where her passion for Russian history led her, she awoke in the middle of the night on her twenty-first birthday with the revelation she wanted to write fiction.

　　Janet Fitch is a faculty member in the Master of Professional Writing Program at the University of Southern California, where she teaches fiction.

　　Some of her favorite authors include Fyodor Dostoevsky and Edgar Allan Poe.

　　Her third novel, Paint It Black, named after the Rolling Stones song of the same name, was published in September 2006.

　　Extra:In addition to the overwhelming success of White Oleander, she has published short stories in literary journals such as A Room of One"s Own, briefly attended film school in the director"s program at the University of Southern California, worked at various times as a typesetter, a proofreader, a graphic artist, a freelance journalist, the managing editor of American Film magazine, and the editor of The Mancos Times Tribune, a weekly newspaper in the mountains of Southwestern Colorado. Currently, she teaches fiction writing at the University of Southern California"s Masters of Professional Writing program. She lives in Los Angeles.

　　White Oleander, the story published in Black Warrior Review which grew into her novel, was named as a distinguished story in Best American Short Stories 1994.

　　Interestingly enough, the story was rejected from The Ontario Review with a note from Joyce Carol Oates, long a literary hero of Fitch"s, saying that while she enjoyed it, it seemed more like the first chapter of a novel than a short story. It had never occurred to Fitch to extend the story, but, armed with this advice, she decided to take a chance and write the novel.

　　Her writing process is simple. "I write all the time, whether I feel like it or not," she says. "I never get inspired unless I"m already writing. I write every day, including weekends. For writers there are no weekends. It"s just that your family is around, looking mournful, wondering when you"re going to pay attention to them."

　　Her journalistic experience proved a vaccination against writer"s block. "When I had the newspaper, I had to come up with 12 or 15 stories a week regardless of whether there was anything to write about. Someone would call me up and say, "My kid just caught a big fish, come over and take a picture of it." So you"d go take a picture of the fish and then interview the kid. What do you ask a kid who caught a big fish? "What kind of bait were you using? Where"d you catch it? What time of day was it?" I learned you could always write. You just couldn"t be too perfectionistic about it."

　　But the artistry of her work, the lines that take the reader"s breath away, were hard-won. "I could always tell a story," she said, "but I needed to learn the poetics of the literary craft." She found her mentor in the poet and novelist Kate Braverman, under whom she learned to work until she found the right word, the right sound.

　　Poetry plays a great part in her writing of prose fiction. "I always read poetry before I write, to sensitize me to the rhythms and music of language. Their startling originality is a challenge. I like Dylan Thomas, Eliot, Sexton. There are parts of White Oleander which use cadences of Pound--whatever you think of Pound, there"s a specific music to him. I like Joseph Brodsky and the late Donald Rawley. A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words."