Re-read

White Oleander, Janet Fitch (1999)

This book is one of the very best in lyrical prose.  It opened a whole new world for me as a writer when I first read it about four or five years ago.  It was like finding home: here was a book of fiction in my lap written in a way I had only imagined (and thought unlikely to exist) up until the time.  Everything I had read before was kept "clean, cut" formulaic, "the language simple", but Fitch married poetry and prose in a most splendid manner.  More importantly to me — like Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, et al. — she was another writer who affirmed my pen; they continue to tutor me in the ways of writing not-so-beautiful stories beautifully, daringly.  The grotesque, the ordinary, and seemingly minor can indeed be depicted picturesquely.

This excerpt is in the voice of the novel's narrator Astrid about her poet/scorned/murderer mother: 

"I didn't want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid's shoes grown too small [...] She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot.  I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress."