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Literary Assassin
Revealing the secret histories of Joan Didion, Donna Tartt, and Eve Babitz.
In the course of my research, though, I learned that the book was, apart from the homicidal bits, practically a roman à clef, an imaginative re-creation of her first year at Bennington, when she fell under the spell of a mysterious and possibly sinister professor of ancient Greek and his band of glamorous students. I explained how Tartt entered Bennington a product of her time and place: Her senior photo from high school (a “segregation academy” called Kirk) shows a ’70s suburban Scarlett O’Hara. So I wouldn’t get sued!”), shaping it into a coherent narrative, making it all pop: Igor Stravinsky’s goddaughter, Marcel Duchamp’s nude, Jim Morrison’s consort; the mash note she wrote to Joseph Heller when in her teens, the fire she set that nearly burned her alive when in her 50s.
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