{"id":5209,"date":"2023-12-11T11:39:03","date_gmt":"2023-12-11T11:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thequeensreadingroom.co.uk\/?p=5209"},"modified":"2023-12-11T11:39:06","modified_gmt":"2023-12-11T11:39:06","slug":"qa-with-donna-tartt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thequeensreadingroom.co.uk\/qa-with-donna-tartt\/","title":{"rendered":"Q&A with Donna Tartt"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Donna Tartt has been incredibly generous in agreeing to answer some questions that were sent to her by The Queen\u2019s Reading Room.<\/em><\/h3>\n

Here are some of her insightful and astute responses.<\/em><\/h3>\n

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You have written three novels, all of which have been extremely successful. When you are writing fiction, do you ever think about how the work will be perceived by the reader?<\/h3>\n

I try not to. For me, it\u2019s not helpful. Stephen King once said something to the effect of: Don\u2019t give readers what they want. Give them what you<\/em> want. By which I think he meant: readers tend to be most pleased when they are given not the novel that they expect, but the novel that they want and don\u2019t yet know that they are looking for.<\/p>\n

The Secret History<\/em> was so different from the rank and file of literary novels being written in the late 1980s that I was given many confident predictions of its failure – I was told to shorten it drastically, that the male narrator was a mistake, that the tone was too elegiac and not contemporary enough – I\u2019m glad I didn\u2019t listen and went ahead and wrote the book I wanted to write. It\u2019s impossible to know how anything will be perceived by an audience. The most important thing is to be happy with one\u2019s own work. If I\u2019d tried to write something more conventional for the time and more in line with what I was told readers wanted, I doubt I would have stayed interested in the book long enough to finish it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Much has been made of the years that it takes to construct your novels. Is this a conscious choice or an unavoidable vagary of your writing style?<\/h3>\n

Something of both. All my novels, including the one I\u2019m writing now, are very different from each other, and to invent new worlds and new characters from the ground up takes a while. At the end of a novel and the beginning of a new one I\u2019m always starting from absolute scratch – the old edifice is swept away and I\u2019m starting all over again with not much more than some boards and a few tools.<\/p>\n

Then too I write the kind of books that I like to read\u2014long books that keep me in the same imaginal space and with the same characters for a long time and that take over a big portion of my inner life, including my dream life. Though I\u2019ve written a few short stories, they\u2019re not the form I enjoy most, as writer or reader. Just as you\u2019re starting to be interested, the party is over and you\u2019re being shown the door.<\/p>\n

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The Secret History<\/em> is narrated by Richard Papen, a character desperate to immerse himself in the beauty, love and wisdom that he has never known. When you look back on the character of Richard, do you think of him fondly?<\/h3>\n

I do. In many ways he stays with me more than any character I ever wrote, since I was so young when I began writing The Secret History<\/em>. Richard\u2019s narrative voice – initially an invented voice, for the purposes of the story – was the voice I wrote in for many years. Over time Richard\u2019s voice became entwined with my own, so that in terms of style it\u2019s hard now in some places for me to see where Richard\u2019s voice ends and mine begins.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

When you wrote The Secret History<\/em>, did you intend to write about what makes life meaningful?<\/h3>\n

I\u2019m not sure there\u2019s any other reason to write, not for me anyway. The novel as an art form is mostly about the search for meaning. The students in The Secret History<\/em> are searching intently for meaning – for the Real – but in grasping for it so desperately they grab it by the wrong end.<\/p>\n

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Are you working on your next novel?<\/h3>\n

I am.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Can you envisage a life where you are not creating fiction?<\/h3>\n

Novels are all about experiences we haven\u2019t had, and one of the peculiarities of a novelist\u2019s mind is an ability to enter into all sorts of different lives. But though I can envisage it clearly enough, I\u2019ve never wanted a life where I didn\u2019t write.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Can you please explain to The Queen\u2019s Reading Room why reading and books are so important to you and how they have impacted your work?<\/h3>\n

That\u2019s a big question, but on the most basic level I began writing because I love to read. My mother\u2019s family are readers and librarians and I loved books instinctively, early on – I was often read aloud to as a child, and books were a way of being with, and talking to, the people I loved most. Over time, I developed deep relationships with individual books and works, and these deep relationships and conversations form the genesis of my own books – my undergraduate engagement with classical literature and philosophy, for instance, is the mainspring of The Secret History<\/em>.<\/p>\n

On the simplest level books are comfort and escape; on the deepest, they are empathy and wisdom. Literature allows us to enter into the inner life and inner experience of other people as no other art form is able to do, and in novels particularly we have the experience of being someone else – of knowing another person\u2019s soul from the inside. No other art form or medium can do that. To write a novel, as to read a novel, is to experience the astonishment of inhabiting another personality, another life.<\/p>\n

Moreover, novels like no other medium teach us about time: how life works in time and how we evolve, or don\u2019t, by the choices we make. What\u2019s the good life? What are our blind spots? What matters most? The answers are different for everybody and can change drastically over the span of a life. A great novel by Dickens or Dostoyevsky will add extensively to someone\u2019s knowledge of human nature and of how the world works. And a really powerful book will change us from the inside, permanently. If people still view books as dangerous enough to be banned, it\u2019s for this reason: because it\u2019s possible to read a book and at the end of the book to be literally a different person.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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More online exclusives<\/h2>\n\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Watch <\/h6>\n

Treasures from the library<\/h4><\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n \"2022-02-15-4-2\"\n <\/a>\n <\/div>\n
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