![]() ![]() Chances are Tartt's life, like most writers' lives, is not especially exciting or exotic, but because it is largely unknown, it can be romanticised. ![]() There is no reason to doubt her sincerity in this, but as with other secretive authors, her reticence tends to fuel the mystique rather than stifle it. ![]() Tartt prefers not to discuss her personal life with the media, insisting that the focus remain on her work, and she has mostly succeeded in keeping it that way. Then the fabulous book contract at the age of 28, long glossy magazine profiles and a first novel, The Secret History, which became both a bestseller and a cult favourite. With the contemporary novelist Donna Tartt, there is a faintly unreal quality to her biography, a modern-day fairytale: the bookish child from a small Mississippi town turned literary prodigy, embraced by southern-lit gurus Barry Hannah and Willie Morris in her first year at the University of Mississippi, swept off to the russet-leafed hothouse of Bennington College in Vermont to rub shoulders with embryonic stars such as Bret Easton Ellis and Jonathan Lethem. ![]() T he lives of certain authors resemble their work in the way dogs are said to resemble their masters: Ernest Hemingway's valourisation of a stoic masculinity that abruptly guttered out when confronted with its own inadequacy the jolly, indefatigable showmanship of Charles Dickens concealing the long-guarded secret of his relationship with Ellen Ternan. ![]()
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