Day 10 - Tartt and Flynn - Some background, and their inspirations

Ah, I am done with All the Missing Girls now! The ending was unexpected. I can’t really say anything else about it here without spoiling the book, so that’s about everything that I can say of the book now. READ IT! The mystery is too good, and understanding the whole thing is satisfying!

Yesterday, I did some research about two authors that I have absolutely fallen in love with after reading their first novel: Donna Tartt and Gillian Flynn. I saw their interviews, read about what they had to say about their respective books (Secret History and Gone Girl). I found this amazing elle.com article which is an interview with Flynn about her book, and this article is so tastefully written. Nothing like the normal drab style in which most interviews are written (Most of them are just Q and A type, with Q: … A: … without any comments from the author at all, which make them feel like the transcript to a video and hardly qualify as an article)

Donna Tartt worked for almost 8 years on Secret History, and that book was so good. It was about 600 pages long (or longer) and her other two books are actually longer. Goldfinch being about 770 pages long. I would love to read these two and complete my Tartt experience, but frankly, it’s too big of a commitment for now, and I can’t really make it. (Surprisingly, Tana French, who writes books that have an eerie similarity to Tartt’s books, also writes books that are large ~ about 400-430 pages.)

Tartt also said that she loved poetry and wanted to be a poet in a 1992 interview of her. She also mentioned Dickens as someone who’s writing influenced her!

Flynn’s background though is a bit more interesting. She worked for almost 10 years in Entertainment Weekly, writing God knows what (I couldn’t find her articles with a cursory search, could dig more for sure), she then started working on Sharp Objects.

At EW she could be up to her eyeballs in kiss kiss bang bang, but kiss kiss bang bang at a remove, safely confined to the screen, dissipating once the credits rolled and the lights came up. She stayed on staff for 10 years, writing about movies and TV.

And she was inspired to do so by Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River. Yup, that is certainly on my reading list now! While Sharp Objects was a fine book, it had a good character list, the revelation at the end is ominous and I felt like it had been looming over everyone for almost the whole book now, with how creepy that particular character is, Dark Places was the REAL DEAL! In some ways, the dysfunctional female lead in Dark Places was even more shocking and full of promise compared to Amy Dunne, the psychopath from heaven. (That phrase should mean something special).

I am looking for the next book to read. I am going to go search for that now! That’s it.

POST #10 is OVER