The Uncertainty Principle

"I never had any reason to be critical of her," Alma Fitch insists. "First of all, I wasn't a writer. Second, I could see the determination in her; I could see that writing wasn't a hobby. It was a calling. All I could do," she says, "was stand back and watch her dedication in awe."

IN 1995, FITCH HAD A PARTY AT HER HOUSE TO celebrate the sale of her first book, a young-adult novel called Kicks. "It never went anywhere. But I did sell it, and I had a party and put up all my rejection notices on the wall. They reached from the baseboard to over my head, on all four walls of the living room.

"When you're used to that," she says, "success is a shock. You have to look at yourself totally differently. Your whole strategy of life is a defense against failure, and suddenly there's success -- you don't know how to deal with that." She was answering phones at her mother's office when Oprah called to congratulate her; a few days later, Warner Bros. called with a film deal. The book had been out a month. ("I thought, 'What's next? A date with Bigfoot?'") The endorsement put her on the best-seller list, but not without reservations: Fitch worried whether people who don't read literary fiction, "who are sometimes more literal in their reading," would react to a book that "deals with such gray areas of what is moral and what is real." The day she watched on television as Oprah handed out the book to her studio audience, "I had this surreal vision that when people went to open it, it just might explode. Like, Pow!"

Fitch is now hard at work on her next book, but it is not the next book she was talking about a few months ago, the one about L.A. in the 1920s. "It would be so nice to say, 'Oh yes, I'm almost done with this second book, and it's going well.' But I basically don't know what is happening. I was working on one book for three years, and then this other one just came out of nowhere, totally turned over the apple cart." This time, she'd rather not talk about it. "The apples are still rolling on the floor," she says. "I still don't know where they're going to land."