Originally Posted by
Tyrion Cheddar
When I read the above about The Goldfinch winning the Pulitzer and being compared to Dickens, I almost fell off my chair. Let me tell you all why.
In the early 1980s, I was a student at Bennington College. As some of you may know, Bennington had a reputation for producing great and famous writers, among other things. (Bret Easton Ellis was a classmate and acquaintance of mine and, while he may not be a great writer by any means, he wrote and published Less Than Zero while we were there and it exploded onto the scene and made him a celebrity overnight.)
I stayed at Bennington through two of the summer breaks to take writing workshops, one of the things the school was famous for, because their reputation enabled them to bring some heavy hitting authors to the school to teach these intimate (twelve people in a group, maybe) workshops in which you'd get to bring in your work and have it read and critiqued by these authors as well as your fellow students. Which brings me to my tale about Donna Tartt.
I didn't know her personally, but at a school of only 600 students, everyone sort of knew everyone, at least a little, by name or association, and she was in one of these workshops I was in. I remember her as this very quiet, pale, red-haired girl who I always saw hanging around with the same one friend, another very quiet dark-haired girl who was also in the workshop.
So, the day came when the rest of us had all brought in our works in progress and now it was her turn. She brought in two finished chapters of something she was working on which would become The Secret History. The author leading the workshop responded to it very differently than to any of ours, telling Donna it was "word perfect", that she shouldn't change anything and even offering to show it to her agent. A couple of years later I was sitting in front of the tube on evening, and there was Donna on Charlie Rose, talking about The Secret History.
So while I'm not entirely shocked by the reaction to The Goldfinch, given all this and the response to The Secret History, The Pulitzer...I mean, **** me. ;-)
And here I end my tale, and prepare to drink myself into a stupor sufficient to believe my own bullcrap about my actually being an undiscovered genius who could have achieved all the same as Donna Tartt and received the same accolades, but who simply *chose* not to. :-0