Suddenly, Josie finds it “hard to know who to believe.” While Michael’s mother attacks Josie at the gravesite, Cal shows a vague, generalized kindness, but when Josie discusses Michael with Cal, it becomes obvious to Josie that Michael hasn’t been entirely honest about himself. Josie attends Michael’s funeral and here she meets Michael’s divorced parents-writer Cal Faraday-who’s since remarried and has a new family, and Michael’s elegant mother, concert pianist Meredith Loewy. For example, Michael told Josie he couldn’t drive, and yet he drove a rented car to the motel where he was found dead. While trying to cope with the aftermath of Michael’s death, Josie begins to realize that some things just don’t add up about the suicide. Michael is currently at his mother’s fancy family mansion working on an art project-well at least that’s the story he told Josie, but Josie gets a phone call from the coroner’s office that Michael has committed suicide in a bleak motel in Twenty-Nine Palms. But he’s dropped out of his senior year at Harvard to become an artist.

Michael, on the other hand, is an only child who has had every opportunity that money, privilege, and education can offer. As a teenager, Josie ran away from her miserable, underprivileged home and notoriously rotten family to come to Los Angeles. When the novel begins, Josie, an artist’s model and avant-garde film actress, shares a small house in a rundown area of Los Angeles with Michael Faraday. These are troubled times, and over the course of two days, John Lennon is shot and killed, and Darby Crash, cofounder of the pivotal LA punk band, The Germs “killed himself in an act of desperate theatre.” The novel is set in the early 80s against the vivid and aggressively alive Punk Scene, and Josie is an integral part of the crowd that haunts the small, grimy, smoke-filled, graffiti-covered Punk clubs and bars. Those who loved White Oleander will no doubt enjoy Fitch’s long-anticipated novel, Paint It Black and its heroine, Josie Tyrell, a tough, independent bleached blonde from Bakersfield who’s scraping a living in Los Angeles. The reasons lay one under the other-which ball was the real ball?'Īfter Janet Fitch’s phenomenally successful book White Oleander, readers waited with baited breath for her next novel.

She had reached some quiet place, like a carved ivory ball down inside five others. Like if he could do that, maybe he could save himself.

Paint it Black by Janet Fitch