Paint It Black
(Little, Brown, September 2006)

The aftermath of a suicide, set in 1980 punk rock LA. Josie Tyrell, art model, teen runaway, actress in student films, thinks she’s found her chance at real love and entre to a greater world in Michael Faraday—artist and Harvard dropout, son of a renowned concert pianist and grandson of a legendary film composer--until the day she receives a call from the Los Angeles County Coroner, asking her to identify her lover’s body. “What happens to a dream when the dreamer is gone?” is the central question of Paint It Black, the story of the aftermath of Michael’s death, and Josie’s struggle to hold on to the true world he had shared with her. Compounding her grief and rage is Michael’s pianist mother, Meredith Loewy, who returns to her native city with the news of her only son’s death. Despite a fierce mutual enmity, the two women find themselves drawn into an eerie relationship reflecting equal parts distrust and blind need.

From Janet: Here are the works that informed Paint It Black (ran in September 2006 issue of Poets and Writers)

We live in the creative products of our civilization no less than we live in a house on a street in a city in a country at a certain time in history.  This is just some of the music that plays constantly inside my head, the colors of my internal palette, that bleeds through all my work, and specifically, informed Paint It Black.
Poems:

 “Love in the Asylum,” “Altarwise by Owl-Light,” “Over Sir John’s Hill,” and “In Country Sleep,” by Dylan Thomas. There’s a whole Dylan Thomas theme in Paint It Black.  “Love in the Asylum” was actually the title of the short story.

“Riding the Elevator into the Sky,” by Anne Sexton, from The Awful Rowing Towards God.  Sexton and my protagonist have many fears and yearnings in common.  I can’t get her language out of my ears.

“Burnt Norton” from  Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, also The Wasteland. The end of time theme. Eliot’s poetry is a constant song.

The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Jeanne of Montmartre, by Blaise Cendrars. There’s a whole Transsiberian theme in the book, and I think Cendrars captures the restlessness and extremes of youth so  beautifully.

The Ballad of Reading Gaol, by Oscar Wilde.  Each man kills the thing he loves.

Other books:
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, totally evocative of time and place.

Music:
Punk music, circa 1980, with special emphasis on LA.  X, Germs, Cramps.  I have a character who is a cross between Nina Hagen and Lena Lovich.

Patti Smith, who inspires me always.
Nico, and Velvet Underground with Nico.  Nico to me embodies absolutely the dark poignancy of this book, songs like “These Days” and “Fairest of the Seasons,” which so evoked the boy’s mindset in my book.

Classical piano repertoire.  Late Brahms piano music, really spoke to me, the Romances and Intermezzos.  The musical voice of one of the book’s major elements.

Schoenberg Pierrot Lunaire, both for the modernism and the fact that Schoenberg was an exile from Nazi dominated Europe, like the grandfather in the book,
Debussy, for that out-of-time sense of a house in mourning.

1920’s music—The ‘golden age’ music of the book, so to speak. Louis Armstrong and the Hot Fives and Sevens, Lucille Bogan, Big Bill Broonzy, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith.

Films:
Ciao Manhattan and Chelsea Girls, just to see Edie Sedgwick, an icon of this period, and evocative of my protagonist in certain ways.

Last Tango in Paris.  One forgets, this is really the story of a suicide survivor.
Sunset Boulevard.  For Goth feel.  Billy Wilder was another exile from Nazi Europe.

Visual arts:
Egon Schiele, the boy’s favorite artist—a somehow desperate, highly eroticized, painter of the Viennese Secession.  I love this period, but it took me a while to warm to Schiele.

Paul Tchelichew—disturbed, metamorphic drawings--highly inspirational.

Eric Fischl—I craved his eerie eroticised domestic scenes.

White Oleander
(Little, Brown, 1999)

Astrid is the only child of a single mother, Ingrid, a brilliant, obsessed poet who wields her luminous beauty to intimidate and manipulate men. Astrid worships her mother and cherishes their private world full of ritual and mystery--but their idyll is shattered when Astrid's mother falls apart over a lover. Deranged by rejection, Ingrid murders the man, and is sentenced to life in prison.

White Oleander is the unforgettable story of Astrid's journey through a series of foster homes and her efforts to find a place for herself in impossible circumstances. Each home is its own universe, with a new set of laws and lessons to be learned. With determination and humor, Astrid confronts the challenges of loneliness and poverty, and strives to learn who a motherless child in an indifferent world can become.

Tough, irrepressible, funny, and warm, Astrid is one of the most indelible characters in recent fiction. White Oleander is an unforgettable story of mothers and daughters, burgeoning sexuality, the redemptive powers of art, and the unstoppable force of the emergent self. Written with exquisite beauty and grace, this is a compelling debut by an author poised to join the ranks of today's most gifted novelists.

Kicks
(Fawcett Books, 1996)
(Young Adult Reading Level)

Laurie thinks Carla is the luckiest kid in Los Angeles. After all, Carla has parents who let her do anything she wants. Laurie's mother keeps her on a short leash, demanding that she keep the house clean, cook for her sick father, and stay out of trouble. Still, at Carla's instigation, they manage to keep things on the street exciting. Sometimes it's shoplifting, sometimes it's hitching a ride, sometimes it's smoking and flirting on the beach with older guys. If Laurie could only be as brave and daring as Carla, she knows her life would be a lot more interesting.

But Laurie also knows that Carla sometimes takes crazy chances. And one night when Carla is in trouble only Laurie can help her--only Laurie and one other person, someone who loves Laurie more than she realizes, someone who would do anything to be with her. . . "Capture[s] the dark underside of growing up . . . Teens will empathize with Laurie's desire to be free from familial rules and responsibilities, and the realism of some scenes will horrify yet fascinate them."

The Alexandria Quartet, by Lawrence Durrell.  I love the sensuality of Durrell’s prose and the intricate layering of his 1930s Alexandria, its mystery and cruelty and intimacy, the tangle of its relationships. the poetics of its landscape.  Scenes such as that in the child bordello, or the madwoman in her pavilion with the resident cobra, have expanded my understanding of what can be captured on the printed page.

Blonde, by Joyce Carol Oates. All the prodigious imagination and stylistic bravura of Joyce Carol Oates comes to bear upon the often-told but little-examined mythic life of Marilyn Monroe, with breathtaking results. This is my favorite J.C.O. since the great short story collections of the ’60s and early ’70s—Upon the Sweeping Flood, By the North Gate, Marriages and Infidelities, and The Wheel of Love.

The Memory Room by Mary Rakow.  A hugely talented stylist builds a novel from musically related fragments, with echoes and refrains. The work, which centers on a woman grappling with the primal knowledge of evil in our mundane world, gains its power through the gradual accumulation of these tiny, shimmering fragments.

Palinuro of Mexico by Fernando del Paso.  A world-eater.  Like Joyce on ecstasy, the sheer joy and imaginative energy of del Paso is a wonder of the world.  When I forget what love and youth felt like, I read this book.

They Whisper by Robert Olen Butler. The best portrayal of the masculine erotic sensibility in modern literature. I’m addicted to this novel’s lyrical prose, its sexual charge and surprising tenderness. 

Play It as It Lays, by Joan Didion. The radioactive lives of late ’60s show-biz Angelinos play themselves out in minimalist gritty chapters that can punch you in the face with a single line. Nobody writes a dialogue scene like Didion.