This is not Chick Lit

Martha O’Connor’s debut novel THE BITCH POSSE, just out now, is one of the most eye-opening, gut-wrenching first efforts I’ve come across in quite some time. It’s the kind of book that makes me want to shove it in people’s faces and say “you must read this.” Or in other words, it’s books like this one that make me glad I blog and can do the same thing and not take people’s faces out.

Anyway, she was interviewed over the weekend by her hometown paper, the Marin Independent, about the book, its roots, and her less-than-linear journey to publication:

She began working on “The Bitch Posse” in 2003. It wasn’t her first

book. “I completed my first novel when I was 15 years old. It’s the

worst fantasy novel written,” O’Connor says, laughing. “It’s so bad, my

grandmother is holding onto a copy so she can blackmail me.”

She wrote others, too: a coming-of-age novel, a mystery, but none

gathered too much interest from agents. That’s when O’Connor decided to

write for herself, instead of trying to write something that was

“marketable.” “That was really a mistake,” she says.

So like Rennie, who gets told by her agent that her book is “too heavy”

and she should instead “try some chick lit” – words similar to what

O’Connor had heard from her own, now former, agent – O’Connor wrote to

please herself.

“I said, I don’t care. No one’s going to publish it anyway. I just sat

down and wrote. The first draft flowed out of me,” she says.

She finished it in six weeks.

The book’s pretty damn dark as it is, but originally, it was even darker:

Tying up all the pieces in a happy feel-good ending wasn’t what

O’Connor wanted. “I feel like a lot of books I read don’t leave the

reader thinking. I wanted the reader to kind of finish what happened to

the characters. But I do feel it is a meaningful ending, even if it’s

not an ending that answers all your questions.”

The book, which was just published by St. Martin’s Press (352 pages,

$22.95), is No. 6 on the best-seller list this week in Marin.

O’Connor says the book isn’t some kind of wake-up call for parents –

although underage drinking, adolescent sex and self-mutilation are very

real problems, not only in Marin but across the country. But if it

opens some dialogue and gets parents and teens to find a way to

connect, that wouldn’t be too bad, she says.

If anything, it’s made her a little extra-tuned-in to her relationship with her own kids.

“I’m trying to keep an honest level of communication. They’re just in

second grade. As time goes on, I want them to be able to come to me

with problems,” she says.

Because her son is diabetic and using drugs could be “a disaster for

him, we already talk about consequences of certain behaviors.”

O’Connor’s working on a new novel, which she’s keeping mum about, but if it channels the kind of raw rage and magnetism of her first, it’s going to be powerful stuff.