writer and author of the novels The Secret History
(1992) and The Little Friend
(2002). She won the WH Smith Literary Award
for The Little Friend in 2003.
The daughter of Don and Taylor Tartt, she was born in Greenwood, Mississippi
and raised in the nearby town of Grenada
. At age five, she wrote her first poem, and she was first published in a Mississippi literary review when she was 13.
Enrolling in the University of Mississippi
in 1981, she pledged to the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma
.
Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.
Anyway, it gets into one's blood, this long lonely way of writing, like a long sea-voyage.
But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.
But romantic vision can also lead one away from certain very hard, ugly truths about life that are important to know.
Character, to me, is the life's blood of fiction.
Children - if you think back really what it was like to be a child and what it was like to know other children--children lie all the time.
Children have very sharp powers of observation - probably sharper than adults - yet at the same time their emotional reactions are murky and much more primitive.
Children love secret club houses. They love secrecy even when there's no need for secrecy.
Everything takes me longer than I expect. It's the sad truth about life.
For a novelist to create character, I think, takes a sharp objective eye but also an intuitive intelligence, a receptiveness, a wilingness to make oneself blank in order to perceive things as they actually are.