The Secret History
The Secret History
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Donna Tartt on The Secret History
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A Vermont winter that never left herThe novel began at Bennington College and, in one sense, never left the campus. Tartt started the early chapters as a student, then finished the final sections years later in New York, writing back toward a world she had lost. The pull was specific and physical: the enclosed, hothouse atmosphere of a small Vermont college in winter, which she could only recover by writing her way into it.
When I left, I wanted to be back at school so bad, and writing was a way of getting back to that.
The raw material, though, was never purely autobiographical. She was braiding together sources that had nothing obvious to do with each other.
The spark was not one idea but a collision of four. The Greek texts she was reading in her classics courses, the landscape of a Vermont she had never experienced before age nineteen, a famous 1924 murder case involving two University of Chicago students, and the cold case of a Bennington student who vanished in 1946 without explanation: all of them arrived together and none of them would release her.
The Secret History has to do with the Greek tragedy and Greek philosophy I was reading, with my first experience of a Vermont winter, but also with the Leopold and Loeb murder case and the unsolved 1940s disappearance of a student named Paula Weldon.
Bennington in the late 1980s ran on minimalism. Workshop after workshop pushed students toward spare, restrained fiction modeled on Raymond Carver, and Tartt had grown up reading Dickens and Mark Twain. The Secret History was, among other things, a refusal. She wrote it knowing the predictions against it were unanimous.
The Secret History 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’m glad I didn’t listen and went ahead and wrote the book I wanted to write.
The novel’s most unusual structural choice, placing the murder at the very beginning so the reader knows who did it before page two, came directly from her reading of Greek epic. Hitchcock gave her the theoretical framework she needed to defend it: suspense arises not from surprise but from dread, from watching characters move toward an outcome the audience already sees coming. She was working out that problem when she made the decision that defined the whole book.
The very first step in a way was deciding to reveal the murderer on the first page... partly because I’d been studying Greek. And there’s tremendous suspense in the Iliad, and you know everything that’s going to happen. They tell you everything that’s going to happen in the first six lines. And this was just a very interesting question to me. How do you create suspense from knowing what we already know? [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Eight years, a male voice, and Sibelius on repeatThe manuscript took the better part of a decade. That span was not spent drafting slowly in sequence: Tartt wrote every day, grinding through a project that had no market precedent and that at least one prominent editor declared unpublishable. Bret Easton Ellis, who had been reading chapters since their shared Bennington years, kept pressing her to finish. The book she eventually delivered was the book she had started in college.
Worked every day. Worked every day for eight years. [paraphrased from audio]
The decision to use a male narrator, Richard Papen, was made on technical grounds and nearly killed the project. A well-known editor told Tartt no woman had successfully published a novel written from a male point of view and demanded she rewrite it. She stopped for roughly a year. When she returned, the logic of her original choice had not changed: a female narrator would have warped every other character’s behavior in ways that would have wrecked the story she was trying to tell.
I had a fairly well-known editor tell me that ‘The Secret History’ would never be published because no successful book by a woman had ever been written from the point of view of a man, and that I would have to change it to a female narrator. But that novel would never have worked with a female narrator because then you would inevitably have the question of whether she was attracted to some of the male characters… it would just never work. It would have been a different book. It could only work if no question of attraction came into it.
At the John Adams Institute, Tartt elaborated on what the first-person point of view was actually doing in technical terms. The novel’s engine runs on what the reader cannot know: the inner lives of the other characters. A third-person narrator, or a first-person narrator who was a woman placed among men who would perform differently for her, would have dissolved the opacity the book depends on.
It was obvious to me from the outset that this book had to be told from the point of view of a first-person narrator. It was essential that one never know what the other characters are thinking. [paraphrased from audio]
Living inside Richard Papen’s prose for eight years left a mark that Tartt only recognized later, when she tried to write in a different voice. She had started with an invented persona and ended up fused to it. The admission is worth pausing on: a voice chosen for reasons of narrative strategy became, over time, something closer to her own natural register.
Richard’s narrative voice — initially an invented voice, for the purposes of the story — was the voice I wrote in for many years. Over time Richard’s voice became entwined with my own, so that in terms of style it’s hard now in some places for me to see where Richard’s voice ends and mine begins.
That fusion between author and narrator gives the book one of its stranger qualities: reading it, you sense a voice that is both performing detachment and actually feeling everything.
The reading that fed the novel was precise and deliberate. Tartt has named Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a book without which she could not have imagined the project, and she situates it carefully: not as a gothic mood piece but as a formally tight, modern-feeling novella that showed her how quickly a book could move toward its darkest material. Alongside it she was reading Alain-Fournier’s Le Grand Meaulnes for its elegiac register, and Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell for their prose discipline.
I couldn’t have written or even thought to write The Secret History without Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, which is sharp and shocking as ever on the page — it’s a short novel, very tight and modern by 19th century standards.
The personal thread
The philosophical texts that changed her thinkingTartt rarely directs readers toward her sources, but for The Secret History she makes an exception. Two Platonic dialogues, the Phaedrus and the Apology, and Euripides’s Bacchae sit at the center of the novel’s argument about beauty, ecstasy, and transgression. She read them as a student at Bennington and describes the experience in terms stronger than influence: they shifted the way she thought.
Anybody wanting to know more about the ideas behind the book should read Bacchae by Euripides (I like the Richmond Lattimore translation) and Phaedrus and the Apology by Plato — a lot of people will be put off by the mention of Plato but these two dialogues in particular were life-changing.
The question of what the novel is ultimately about has followed Tartt for thirty years. When the Queen’s Reading Room asked whether she intended the book as an inquiry into what makes life meaningful, she did not deflect into plot summary. She answered with a statement about why she writes at all, and then placed the characters inside that statement.
I’m not sure there’s 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 are searching intently for meaning — for the Real — but in grasping for it so desperately they grab it by the wrong end.
What she wants us to sit with
One reader, one book, one difficult timeTartt resists thinking about her readership as a collective. The model she returns to, across interviews spanning decades, is private and almost physical: a single person taking a book off a shelf, alone. That model shapes what she hopes the book does, and it shifts the measure of success away from reception and toward something quieter.
Writing a novel doesn’t feel like an address to an audience so much as a direct interaction with one other person — the solitary person who pulls the book off a shelf and reads it, whoever that happens to be — so I’m less concerned with the broader impact of the book than with how it reverberates in the lives of individual readers. If the book keeps someone company during a difficult time in their lives, I’m happy.
She has said she loves hearing from readers who were moved to study classics. The book she meant as a personal reckoning with Greek philosophy has sent people back to the texts that started it.
After thirty years of reader responses, Tartt has noticed a pattern that she regards as neither a problem nor a boast. The book does not produce mild opinions. She observed this in the same 2022 interview, and the observation carries some weight from someone who waited nearly a decade to publish it against unanimous predictions of failure.
The people who connect with The Secret History are passionate about it — it’s not a book for everyone but the responses to it, for better or worse, are seldom lukewarm.