Friday Reads: When Finding Your Identity Means Extracting Yourself from Your Mother’s, White Oleander, Janet Fitch

I know I’m not the only book lover with a complex relationship with film adaptations. When I’ve read a fantastic book, I want to see the movie, just to get another taste of the world that I fell in love with, but I’m also hesitant, because I don’t want to taint my vision of what I’ve read. I had the opposite problem when it came to White Oleander: I saw the movie first.

I don’t think I even realized that White Oleander was adapted from a novel when, back in high school, I stumbled upon the film featuring Michelle Pfeiffer and Alison Lohman. I connected with the angry, resentful Astrid who is onscreen in the middle of the story, and the way that she refuses, and then comes back to, the mystical, private cocoon of a world that she had created with her mother.

When I discovered the book upon which the film is based, I quickly devoured it and discovered a whole new layer of the story I had grown to love: characters that had not made it to film enchanted me and offered a whole new lens through which to see Astrid’s growth and suffering, but what’s more, I discovered an Astrid who longs to reach her poet mother through her own chosen medium of visual art.

The film, understandably, took a bit of poetic license, making both women artists: after all, it’s much easier to understand visual art through a visual medium. But in Fitch’s original story, Ingrid is a poet, while Astrid is a visual artist. The way that the two characters attempt and fail to communicate with one another time and time again through what is essentially a language barrier was wonderfully and achingly frustrating, and witnessing Astrid’s repeated attempts to be free, to separate herself from the woman of whom she is so inextricably a part, and feeling herself reeled back in by – at least in part – her mother’s mastery of the written word, is heart wrenching and exquisite.

This book is an Oprah Book Club book, but it’s far more literary than the badge of approval would have you believe. I don’t often reread books, but this is one I come back to again and again, and each time, I encounter something new that makes me fall in love with it once more.