Yasmina Snyder
BA English with Creative Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London
I find myself returning annually to Janet Fitch’s White Oleander, a novel about a young protagonist, Astrid, who drifts from foster home to foster home throughout Los Angeles (my hometown!). She is thrown into the foster care system after her mother, a writer with some narcissistic tendencies, is convicted of murdering her boyfriend using the poisonous titular flower, oleander.
Astrid, newly alone in a discontinuous and sprawling city, is forced to construct a sense of identity outside of her mother’s watchful gaze. In picturesque fashion, Astrid is taken through several trials spanning the entirety of the city of Los Angeles, leading her to emulate the identities of her varying caregivers. Through this process, Astrid develops a fraught, disjointed sense of identity that is inextricably connected to a sense of place. Janet Fitch’s real and visceral depictions of a city rarely written about from a perspective outside of the film industry showed me what writing can be. White Oleander is the novel that made me want to begin writing about Los Angeles myself, and afforded me the vocabulary to do so.
