‘I’ll be miserable if I had to write things fast’

You don’t expect Donna Tartt, the Salinger-like reclusive author who became a literary superstar at 28, to wander around with a saffron tikka on her forehead, gold danglers and a long, black Kashmiri overcoat clinging to her gamine figure — and be accessible. At the Jaipur Literature Festival, the American was not the cult figure that she is in the West, but those in the know sensed that it was indeed a special sighting.

Tartt, 44, has written only two novels in the past 15 years — The Secret History, which was an instant bestseller and which turned her into a fad, in 1992, and The Little Friend exactly a decade later. But rejoice, Tarttophiles. She is halfway through her third novel and hopes “it doesn’t take a decade again!”. It might be out in two-three years! Her visually lush books, she said, were constructed like a miniature, word by word, sentence by sentence. And she confessed to “being perfectly happy, moving around a comma for a pretty long time”. “I am not a book-churning machine,” her grey-green eyes glared, when asked about the long intervals between her books. “I’ll be miserable if I had to write things fast. I really want to be in that world, get to know it. When I finished my first, I could have recited all of it. I was that novel. There wasn’t much of me left there.”

Tartt, born in Mississippi, the land of Faulkner, is on her first trip to India, but her first contact with the country was many years ago—as a child, reading a Tagore poem in an illustrated book, about a little boy launching paper boats with his name on them. “I wanted to find that boat and I sent my own paper boats to that Indian boy only to see them sinking soon after,” she said, in a conversation with poet Jeet Thayyil.

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She was precocious, writing a poem at five, a sonnet at 13, and making Hunter Thompson, the king of Gonzo, the beneficiary of her life-insurance policy at 14! “It was a school scheme. I adored Thompson and found his address in the Rolling Stone magazine. For me living in the Bible belt, it was interesting to hear someone change the creatures’ language and throw it back at them as though it were a Molotov cocktail,” she said with a glint.

Don’t ask too much about her personal life. But if you must know, she lives with two dogs: “It’s good to have non-verbal company”; recites Upon Westminster Bridge to herself on restless nights and translates Rimbaud. And, no, her next book is not a psychological thriller about a group of people trapped in a lift. “But I can’t tell you what it is. I’m superstitious about a work in progress,” she said.