Sakina Leduc-Akbar

My summer of 2022 was blistering hot and filled with three-star reads. After consuming dozens of books that left me uninspired and unimpressed, I’d lost all hope of coming across a new favorite novel of the season. But right before school started, I came across Donna Tartt’s  psychological thriller novel, The Secret History, tearing through over 150,000 words in four days—a record for a slow reader like myself. Even when I closed the cover, my mind kept returning to the pages. Tartt’s book had thoroughly burrowed itself in my head with no signs of exit.

Set in the fictional institution of Hampden College in Vermont, The Secret History is a gripping tale of obsession, madness, and the sinister underbelly of academia. Protagonist Richard Papen recalls a college experience tainted by his friendship with five pretentious, slightly bizarre Classics students. As Richard grapples with the murder of one of his friends, the characters of the novel find their ordinary lives irreparably uprooted.

The Secret History came to me during a pivotal moment as a writer. I’d been suffering intense writer’s block, doubting my storytelling abilities as I searched aimlessly for any spark of inspiration. Tartt’s novel was exactly that, the spark that triggered a shift in my creative journey. It wasn’t only the immersive, humorous prose or the compelling morally grey characters battling academic elitism that drew me in. It was the way the narrative managed to turn the story of an anxious college freshman into a visceral, haunting cult-classic, a full-body reading experience that let me fall back in love with the English language. Once I was immersed in the world of The Secret History, I knew I wanted to recreate a similar tragic feeling in my own writing.

The only other competing thought I had that summer was the lingering question of what the subject of my AP Art portfolio would be in the fall. I had anticipated taking this class for many years when I first learned of the AP curriculum. Before I was a writer, I spent hours drawing my stories on papers, creating characters out of colored pens and stapling their lives together on printer paper. Naturally, I was thrilled at the opportunity to create a portfolio and excited to return back to visual storytelling after spending much of high school writing novels. I knew the subject had to combine my two favorite things—books and art. An idea struck me one evening while wandering in a bookstore. Why not center my portfolio around my latest fixation, The Secret History?

Assuming the artworks would come to me with ease, I started building my portfolio with confidence, sketching out my ideas in an oversized notebook. But I hadn’t anticipated that translating Tartt’s novel from its written form into a visual medium would challenge me to experiment in art mediums I was uncomfortable with. To succeed, I would need to abandon my black and white fine-line drawings and push myself to use unorthodox materials and bold palettes I had never dared touch before. 

There were countless moments when my art teacher and I inspected my canvas, trying to determine what exactly was so glaringly missing yet so hard to pinpoint. She came to the conclusion that I needed to experiment outside of my artistic comfort zone. Whereas classmates praised my intricate designs, precise linework, and attention to detail, I was now told that if I hoped to succeed, I would have to understand what I was good at and do exactly the opposite. My teacher explained that the point of AP Art was not to culminate a perfect portfolio, but for artists to grow and change, a progression which could be measured by a visible, intense shift in the style and materials of the art.

I believed at first the key to capturing the essence of my favorite novel depended on how accurately I could draw its characters through pencil. I brainstormed drawings where Francis Abernathy, a comedic relief side-character, sat by a window with a cigarette on his finger. I imagined a cross-hatched drawing of Henry Winter, the leader of the group, bent over a book of Homer. But I’d already mastered the style of fine-line drawings, far removed from the experimental style my art teacher ushered me toward.

I failed over and over. My limited understanding of art trapped me in a creative rut. Canvases depicting Richard’s hellish winter in Hampden found themselves discarded, lacking in experimental quality, and each time I left class more discouraged than I’d arrived. In a desperate search for inspiration, I flipped to my favorite quote by Tartt, her words echoing through my head: “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?”

If these fatal flaws  existed outside literature, did that mean they could exist on my paper, too? I moored over Tartt’s quote for days, trying to understand how Tartt managed to summarize the unintelligible, heart-wrenching feel of the novel in just a few words and wondering how I could do the same in just a few pages of art.

My journey brought me to Moe’s Books on Telegraph Ave in Berkeley, where I gathered old newspapers, stamps, crumpled letters, pamphlets that disintegrated at my touch, and a second copy of The Secret History. Many chapters of Tartt’s novel were eviscerated in my artistic process, as pages were ripped from their spines and sliced through with an X-ACTO knife. I traded my fine line pens for pomegranates, smashing the fruit straight onto the paper to match the intensity of the book’s emotional shock. When I first read The Secret History, I was reeling from the unforgettable turn of events, an unexpectedly devastating ending that left a gaping hole in my chest. Determined to replicate this gripping feeling of loss in my final art piece, I drew ravens, one standing tall and another struck down by an arrow, blotted with watercolor and acrylics. I pasted masts of lace fabric ripped from a curtain and glued it into sprawling whorls across the page. This fabric imitated the blinds flowing out the window in the final, harrowing scene of the book, where one of the students unexpectedly dies a tragic death in front of Richard. It was a messy finale in both the novel and on my own paper.

My drawings, now a chaotic ensemble of fabric, fruit, and flowers, made visceral crunch noises when I picked them up, a symptom of layering my paper with book pages, watercolor, and acrylic. The very last scene of The Secret History is arguably the most horrific of all. Readers are confronted with the horrifying image of a character as his body plummets to the ground, mouth falling open and body tipping sideways. This finale, so unapologetically brutal and memorable, emanated from my art, pieces which underwent a similar transformation. My mutilated paper drawings—their bodies punctured with paring knives, slathered in red handprints, suffocated by strips of fabric—were rendered gory and unrecognizable, not unlike a character in their final moments. My artwork engulfed Tartt’s novel until it became something of a palimpsest to the original manuscript. The Secret History’s book form was eaten away by the smudge of my paintbrush and the juice of pomegranates, until only the remnants of the physical book buried under the chaotic ensemble of color and paper remained.

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My artwork engulfed Tartt’s novel until it became something of a palimpsest to the original manuscript…eaten away by the smudge of my paintbrush and the juice of pomegranates, until only the remnants of the physical book buried under the chaotic ensemble of color and paper remained.

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I understand now that this was the entire point—to redefine my understanding of art, and more importantly, to grow as a visual storyteller. My AP Art journey, in some twisted way, was as tumultuous as the reading experience of Richard Papen’s story, one filled with setbacks and adaptation but fueled by my love for a particularly special story. 

Though it’s been years since high school AP Art, I still think about my portfolio and The Secret History often. Since then, I have written all my latest novels in the thriller genre, channeling all the passion and satiric narrative voice of Donna Tartt in my own campus novels.

The Secret History is a book that stays in your body even after the words have left your mind. The reading experience is intense; at times, you might feel disgusted, pitiful, confused, and will likely finish the book left staring at the wall in despair. Regardless, this novel is an addicting read, perfect for aspiring writers in need of a cure to their writer’s block. The persistence it took to complete my AP Art project is proof that there is power in a good book beyond entertainment. It can be the driving force of inspiration for writers like myself, who were lucky enough to come across a story they can now call their all time favorite.

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DONNA TARTT is the author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch. Her work has been published in forty languages and her third novel, The Goldfinch, was awarded the Carnegie Medal and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The Secret History can be purchased here.