All Interviews

Donna Tartt knows people have been talking about her. She's used to it. They started talking in 1992 when the author, then 28, made her literary debut with the best-selling thriller The Secret History. Fans and critics have been discussing her ever since. For 10 years. Wondering what, if anything, the petite woman from Mississippi would do next. For all the speculation, though, Tartt herself has been mysteriously silent.

She is reluctant to do face-to-face or telephone interviews, and agrees only to answer a few e-mailed questions for BookPage. "I always enjoy meeting the people who've read my book," she writes, "It's the actual publicity part television, photographs, interviews with the tape recorder going that's miserable for me." Tartt will have to come to terms with a little publicity misery, though. Her publisher, Knopf, is releasing her second novel, The Little Friend, with a first printing of 300,000.

Departing from the edgy tone of The Secret History, The Little Friend has a prose style bespeaking Tartt's own fondness for 19th-century literature. The difference is deliberate. Even a decade after her first book's publication, Tartt, who's said she'd rather spend the rest of her life reading than write another book, felt the pressure of second novel syndrome. "I found the best way of coping with it was to write a completely different kind of novel, different use of language and diction, different narrative technique, different approaches to story," she writes. "Because I was asking myself a completely different set of questions, the technical aspect kept me constantly engaged; it was almost like writing another first novel."

What her two books have in common is murder. The Secret History features a student murdered at a small artsy New England college, not unlike Bennington, which Tartt attended. The first chapter of The Little Friend begins, "Twelve years after Robin Cleve's death, no one knew any more about how he had ended up hanged from a tree in his own yard than they had on the day it happened." Tartt denies having a criminal mind. That distinction she reserves for "actual lawbreakers, i.e. Ted Bundy or Charles Manson or all those accounting crooks at Enron. But I've always loved Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and I've been interested in accounts of true crime since I was small."

Set in Mississippi in the 1970s, The Little Friend juxtaposes the evil of murder with the innocence of childhood. Robin was 9 when he was hanged, his baby sister Harriet only 1. She grows up in the shadow of his death and at the age of 11, decides to avenge it. Clearly, Harriet is not like most kids. Small for her age with her dark hair bobbed short, she's precocious, bright, fearless, willful, "a bit big for her britches," as her grandmother says. You could argue Harriet is Tartt's alter ego. Tartt, would argue the contrary.

"Harriet isn't so much me as a sort of temperamental strain that recurs from generation to generation in my mother's side of my family. My great-grandfather used to tell stories of his own tomboyish and no-nonsense grandmother." Tartt, the elder of two daughters, portrays childhood so well because it's still all too vivid to her. "There's almost nothing about childhood that I don't remember," she writes. "Running around playing after dark in the summertime, the horrific boredom of school, lying sick in bed with tonsillitis, the exact flavor of haughty outrage alone in one's room after one was punished, simmering hatred of specific schoolteachers, and passionate love of others, petty feuds I had with friends that seemed, in my mind, very grand and Napoleonic."

Childhood, as Tartt remembers it, and as she paints it in The Little Friend, is short of idyllic. Harriet is too often left to her own devices by her mother, Charlotte, in a relationship that's grown distant and disturbed since Robin's death. The only constant in Harriet's life is Ida, the family housekeeper. "Ida was the planet whose rounds marked the hours, and her bright old reliable course . . . ruled every aspect of Harriet's life." When Charlotte fires Ida, Harriet mourns her the way she could never, as a baby, mourn Robin.

Harriet's story reflects the difficulties of being young, and the challenges children face when it comes to accepting authority something Tartt herself did not welcome as a girl. "Children have no money, no rights, no control over their lives," she writes. "It's no fun being told what to do." Seeking justice for her brother's killer is Harriet's way of taking control. As Harriet learns, however, justice is a slippery commodity, and her own sense of right and wrong becomes tarnished in its pursuit.

Her eager sidekick, Hely Hull, isn't as brave or as bright as Harriet, but he's willing to be drawn deeper and deeper into her plans for the sake of adventure and friendship. This includes breaking and entering the apartment of the man Harriet thinks killed Robin, only to be confronted with snakes. "The snakes had patterns on their backs like copperheads, only sharper. On the audacious snake . . . [Hely] now made out the two-inch stack of rattle buttons on the tail. But it was the ones he couldn't see that made him nervous. There had been at least five or six snakes. . . . Where were they?"

"I became interested in the phenomenon of snake handling when I was doing research on Greek mystery cults for The Secret History," writes Tartt, who had the opportunity to do some snake research firsthand. They run amok on her farm in Virginia, where she stays when she's not living in her Upper East Side apartment.

So where is home? "I guess I feel more at home in New York City than anywhere else, because that's where I've lived most of my adult life, but I don't feel entirely at home anywhere," Tartt writes. "Certainly not the South, despite the fact that my family has lived there for a long, long time and still lives there. To be a writer in the South is to be a cultural exile, standing apart from the place of one's birth, never quite at home."

Being a writer in the South has its emotional baggage, too, but Tartt isn't carrying any of it. "Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for literature. He didn't win it for Southern Literature. It seems to me literature is just literature, wherever it comes from." As usual, Tartt gives people something to talk about.

Ellen Kanner is a writer in Miami.

Although novelist Mark Dunn considers himself "an inveterate New Yorker," he’s lost none of his soft Tennessee accent during the 15 years he has lived and worked in the Big Apple. The author, who got his start writing plays, not novels, has been writing since he was a child in Memphis, where he grew up just a block from Graceland. "So I do have Elvis stories," he says.

After the surprise popularity of last year’s Ella Minnow Pea, his critically acclaimed and remarkably clever debut novel about an island whose residents must contend with a shrinking alphabet, Dunn decided he needed "to shift some major gears in terms of what I want to spend the rest of my life writing." During a phone call on a muggy morning to the small West Village apartment he shares with his wife, he explains, "I’m on a mission that every new novel I write is going to bend or tweak narrative as much as I can. I think writers need to be a little more daring. There are a lot of ways to tell stories and construct narratives that writers shy away from because they want to be either traditional or safe. I decided that’s not going to be my mission."

Dunn’s first ambition as an author was to write movies. He majored in film at Memphis State University and did post-graduate work in screenwriting at the University of Texas. But it turned out that a young writer could more easily see his work realized on stage than on screen. So, when he moved with his wife Mary to New York, Dunn began a modestly successful career as a playwright, while working as "a sort of administrative assistant" for the Rare Books and Manuscript division of the New York Public Library— "an incredible place for a writer to work" and the perfect day job for supporting his playwriting fix.

"I fell into theater and found that I really loved it," he says. "I loved telling stories through dialogue. I enjoyed all the restrictions that writing for the theater puts on a writer. I welcomed the challenge of telling stories in two hours with a handful of characters on a minimalist stage, incorporating the audience’s imagination in the storytelling."

In turn, college and community theater audiences seemed to love Dunn’s crisp dialogue, deft comic touch and his willingness to experiment with dramatic form. Of the 25 plays he has written, nine have been published in catalogs of acting editions for theaters to license and produce. Royalties from those productions never provided an actual living, but the attractions of writing for the theater were strong enough that even now, despite newfound success as a novelist, Dunn remains a playwright-in-residence with the New Jersey Repertory Company.

In New York during the early 1990s, working in the tiny second bedroom he and his wife had converted into an office, Dunn began writing the novel that would become his new book, Welcome to Higby,. The narrative is a more wide-ranging effort to fully employ his gift for comedy and dialogue, as well as his willingness to experiment—gifts he developed in playwriting.

Welcome to Higby is a funny, thoroughly charming story of what happens in a small town in northern Mississippi over Labor Day weekend 1993. In the grand scale of things, nothing momentous happens: 15-year-old Clint Cullen falls from a water tower and, by happy chance, lands in a neighbor’s swimming pool; shy, clumsy Carmen Valentine has her eye on a handsome lumberyard Don Juan but meets Euless Ludlam instead; Talitha Leigh is kidnapped by a hapless religio-vegetarian cult; Clint’s widowed father, the Reverend Oren Cullen worries about his grieving son and his own attraction to the owner of the Far East House of Massage out at the edge of town.

On the less grand scale of regular human life, however, Dunn’s novel manages to touch on what troubles and enlivens most of us. His characters, he says, "want to be able to love someone and be loved back. They want to get some kind of handle on God, which troubles us all. . . . I like to say these people are looking for love and faith in all the wrong places." So, in what is the understated masterstroke and great experiment of the novel, Dunn weaves together five separate stories lines, 25 main characters and 60 or 70 supporting characters—and somehow brings them all together for a satisfying conclusion.

Dunn’s inclination to be a little more daring in his storytelling was given a big boost by the unexpected success of Ella Minnow Pea, which has just been released in paperback. Even though its publication a year ago was overshadowed by the events of September 11, this playful first novel about the pleasures of language and the importance of freedom of expression caught the attention of booksellers everywhere, who recommended it widely.

"I was prepared to get a very small reception for the book," says Dunn, who spent a couple of years just trying to getting editors to understand "what in the world I was trying to do in the novel."

Not only has the book’s success made him re-evaluate his writing career, it’s also made him shift some major gears in the way he thinks about himself. As a result of having a twin brother, he says, "I never grew up saying ‘I.’ From an early age it was hard for me to think of the world in terms of just my own place in it, singularly, all by myself." Which may explain part of the attraction of playwriting, the most collaborative of art forms.

"For years and years," Dunn says, "writing a play was one step in a process that involved a lot of people. At some point I would let go of the idea that the play was mine and it became ours. I’m not experiencing that with writing novels. All of a sudden it’s about me and my book, and I’m having a little trouble dealing with that sort of singular attention. I’ve stopped saying ‘we’ and had to learn how to say ‘I.’ "

Alden Mudge writes from Oakland, California.

No one can deny that Child of My Heart is an important novel for Alice McDermott. Readers have been waiting for a follow-up since she won the National Book Award for Charming Billy in 1998. McDermott, however, isn't one to be ruffled by all the hoopla that descended upon her after the award or the resulting pressure to publish.

She's got more pressing, day-to-day worries: a fourth-grade son, a 15-year-old daughter, a 17-year-old son, their homework, after-school activities, a neuroscientist husband, a house to run in Bethesda, Maryland, and writing seminars to teach at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Despite all this, McDermott is easy to talk to and, yes, completely charming. She seems a woman who can be relied on to remain calm and resolute amid almost any storm.

Certainly a storm of publicity rained upon her when she won the National Book Award, a big surprise to many in the literary world, who expected Tom Wolfe to walk away with the honor for A Man in Full. McDermott was so unassuming she didn't even have an acceptance speech prepared.

But then, lots of things happen unexpectedly for McDermott—like her latest novel. The author is quick to admit that Child of My Heart isn't the novel she intended to publish. She was working on two other books, as is her habit (if one isn't going well, she'll switch to another). And then September 11 happened.

As for many of us, McDermott found the world as she knew it turned upside down. Gradually, she started to write again, abandoning the two books she had been working on and launching a new project. Child of My Heart took only six months to complete.

"This was definitely the fastest I've ever written a book," she says. "I had the voice," she adds, and the words came pouring out. The voice belonged to a teenage girl, but McDermott didn't quite know how to categorize what she was writing. "At first I wasn't sure what this was: a short story, a novella, a novel."

Then her longtime agent, Harriet Wasserman—to whom the book is dedicated—stepped in. "I have a wonderful agent who has been by my side my whole publishing career," McDermott explains. Wasserman asked what she was working on, heard her discuss the story, demanded to see the manuscript and decided to publish it right away. McDermott remembers sitting in New York with Wasserman and having her shuffle through the pages, deciding immediately on the title by pointing to a phrase that appears early in the novel.

The book is definitely a child of McDermott's heart, and in the aftermath of 9/11, it's a story about mothering and nurturing, as well as the absence of those things. While nothing in the book is related to terrorist events, many of the themes seem to make sense when viewed from those shadows.

Child of My Heart takes place in East Hampton during a long-ago summer, a season of innocence, comfort and change. There's a pervading sense of melancholy—a sadness that appears in much of her writing, McDermott admits, despite her exceedingly cheerful demeanor. With no chapter divisions and few breaks, the novel reads much like a long short story, a sort of time capsule of a forgotten summer. Unlike her previous novels, it's a purely chronological narrative, but like the previous books, it's all about memory and storytelling.

"Yes, the story really did come out chronologically," McDermott says, "which is also very unusual for me." McDermott shares several traits with her protagonist, a smart, literary 15-year-old named Theresa, the only child of doting parents who left the city so their daughter might have better opportunities in life. (McDermott was born in Brooklyn in 1953, the daughter of first-generation Irish Catholics who later moved to Long Island.) Theresa is named after a saint, and she definitely has saintly qualities. As she explains in the book's first sentence, she is a nurturer: "I had in my care that summer four dogs, three cats, the Moran kids, Daisy, my eight-year-old cousin; and Flora, the toddler child of a local artist."

Theresa, Daisy and Flora form the heart of the novel. Daisy is the ignored and resented middle child of a big Irish family, who is further plagued by ceaseless bruises and an ongoing fever that no adult notices. McDermott acknowledges that Child of My Heart shows the influence of many of her favorite writers. First and foremost is Nabokov and Lolita, as Theresa becomes Lolita to young Flora's father, a famous, aging painter at the end of his career.

"This was a great opportunity for me to pay homage to some of my favorite writers, especially Nabokov. I think of this book as how Lolita herself might have told the story," McDermott explains, adding, "It's also a story that's all about high summer and enchantment.

But all is not fun and games as Theresa's budding sexuality takes control of her relationship with Flora's father. McDermott admits with a laugh that even she, the mother of a teenage girl, became a bit uncomfortable with the way the plot unfolded at times. "My daughter hasn't read the whole thing yet," she says, apparently thankful.

Just as she didn't plan to write this novel, McDermott didn't exactly plan her literary career. She wrote plenty of skits as a student in Catholic schools, and her mother always encouraged her to write down anything that was bothering her. Nonetheless, she claims she wasn't a particularly good student and chose to attend the State University of New York in Oswego only because she heard it was a good party school.

After graduation, McDermott went to work as a typist for a vanity publisher. Later she received a graduate degree in writing from the University of New Hampshire, and the faculty there put her in touch with Wasserman, her agent. In 1982, Random House published her first book, A Bigamist's Daughter, a novel about an editor at a vanity publisher who falls in love with a Southern author.

Today, after two decades of success as a novelist, McDermott remains gentle and approachable, unlikely to intimidate. Asked, for instance, whether she belongs to a book group ("yes") and what they are reading, she doesn't spout literary theory or try to sound scholarly. Instead, she replies, "Oh, just the same things other fourth-grade moms are reading."

When told that many will soon be flocking to read Child of My Heart, she says with heartfelt gratitude: "Thank goodness for book groups!"

Writer and outdoor enthusiast Alice Cary is the author of Parents' Guide to Hiking and Camping.