Author Emulation

Donna Tartt’s work is characterized by attention to topics like growing up & maturity, education, trauma, addiction, status, and obsession, shown through her use of characters who are eccentric, unique, and high-brow. Often, her characters are outsiders with a unique point of view, having experienced very particular, life-changing events. In particular, her speakers are often loners who blend into the crowd, giving the audience the ability to step into the character’s shoes and live the story through them. As such, her narrators usually are not the primary driver of the story; things happen to them, but they don’t make things happen. If they do make things happen, they often tell their stories in a detached, vague way. Typically, her stories start with a reflection on a past moment, followed by an introduction to the speaker and the early events that led them to that point. The plot then continues chronologically, though is usually centered around a tragic event and its aftershocks. When it comes to the physical style of her writing, Tartt chooses words very carefully. She writes directly about events, but is very figurative in her expression of message. Her word choice is academic, intense, and detailed. Ekphrasis, the detailed description of an object or piece of visual art, is heavily employed in her work, such as in her careful, winding descriptions of the painting in The Goldfinch. Tartt’s primary use of figurative language is in large, overarching metaphors, as well as symbolism. Her sentences are long and complex, with heavy use of colons and semicolons to break up the flow. These long sentences give a sense of cadence and musicality to her works, highlighting their pacing and deliberateness.

  As the seasons began to change, winter to spring, I thought about Annabelle, as I often did; of how she loved the gradual shift in the air, her proclivity for gardening and tending to the plants, and of how she must now feel the new spring air warming the cold corpse I had made of her. We’d lived together two years before it happened, in the kind of house I had dreamed of since I was a child: mid-sized, set back from a lake that burbled and rippled in little rivulets down the narrow channel, endless privacy in the form of great pine trees surrounding the grounds.

  I’d met Annabelle in college, at a time in my life that I felt greatly conflicted and confused by the changing expectations of those around me. I’d grow up quite wealthy, though my parents were hardly around, always off at some party doing who knows what, leaving a very curious child alone in a very empty house full of very potent and plentiful alcohol. I began drinking when I was merely 10 years old, and haven’t let up since. I’ve tried to quit endless times, using every method imaginable, from self-detox to rehab to hypnosis, though the infliction still remains; I drink myself into a stupor most nights, and other times drink just enough to drown out every human feeling in my body; everything, that is, except the anger. My father was an exceptionally angry man, flying into fits of rage where he’d smash things up and fling insults like shards of glass, though I never allowed them to slice me too deeply; I simply couldn’t afford that, not when I was so close to getting out. Ever since I was a child, I’d dreamed of becoming an actor, though this was a passion I pursued only in secret, for my father deeply disapproved of artists and would never let me forget it, scoffing and scowling every time I went to see a film at the local movie theatre, and once slapping me across the face when I asked to audition for a local production.

I’d first become acquainted with the popular party drug known as cocaine my freshman year of college; as I drifted from class to class, acting to dancing, I watched myself and my friends shrink in the mirror. Among those in my major, leanness was not just desired; it was necessary. Being skinny and fit meant you were wanted, and being wanted meant jobs, and having jobs meant having money. And that was all any of us wanted. So, by the time I met Annabelle, I was using multiple times every day, always chasing something that could not be reached.

Annabelle was pretty, blithe, and naive. For a while I had truly believed I loved her, but the feeling had faded into one of unspecified care; while it is true I cared deeply for her, I did not desire physical or emotional closeness, did not expect to spend the rest of my life with her. We’d only chose to live together because we could split the rent and share in the responsibility of tending to the estate.  Hiding my habits from her was as easy as pulling wool over the eyes of a lamb being led to the slaughter; in all our time together, I never once suspected that she knew what I was doing. It was only later, when I found her still-warm body splayed on her bed, a trace amount of my lifestyle accessory on the table beside her, that I realized how deeply wrong I was. My latest purchase had been laced, and she had been the one to find it.

In situations such as this, guilt is to be expected. A person may think time and time again about how they shouldn’t have left their stash out, so accessible, so vulnerable. They’ll look back at their history of addiction with regret, and wish they’d tried just a little harder, persevered just a little longer, with the hope that things could have turned out differently. They may never think of touching their drug of choice again, or may fall so deeply back into addiction that they no longer can be saved. And although I have thought about such things, although I have pondered the ways in which it could have turned out differently, I have never once felt guilty. It has often been said that two things can be true at once; a person can be introverted in some cases, and extroverted in another, or feel both afraid and brave simultaneously, but my internal paradox is this: Those drugs were mine, and not a bit of what happened is my fault.

My story is primarily centered around topics of addiction and tragedy, topics that Tartt often explores in her works. Other topics favored by Tartt, such as education and growth, are important cornerstones of the work as a whole, with the unnamed narrator gaining the habit that drives the story while growing up and in college. I kept my narrator unspecific and vague; although he drives the story, he presents the events in a detached way that creates distance between himself and what has happened. As my excerpt is written in the style of a prologue, I began with a few sentences about the tragedy itself, before delving into a vague overview of the events that led to the central tragedy, that being the unintended death of Annabelle. I paid close attention to the figurative language I used, selecting words carefully, as Tartt does, to convey exactly the feelings I intended. When I use words and phrases like “flinging insults like shards of glass,” “slice,” “lamb to the slaughter,” and “not a bit,” I tapped into Tartt’s ability to create a distinct voice for her narrator. The glass metaphors highlight the sharpness and cruelty of the father’s words, the multiple lamb and wool metaphors convey Annabelle’s suspected obliviousness while also likening her to an innocent creature, and references to the narrator’s lack of guilt highlights Tartt’s tendency to write about people who hold unique points of view. Finally, I created far-reaching sentences, connecting ideas with colons and semicolons, where appropriate. When combined with a few short statements, the pacing of my work contains the deliberateness and care of Tartt’s work.