#once upon a time at bennington college

[sparklygraves]

I’ve been thinking a lot about Boris explaining why he stole the painting by saying “I am thief” (page 563). I feel like this is also true of Donna Tartt.

I’m not saying it’s a bad thing-- in many ways, it’s an incredible gift. she sees things, people, places-- collects them, presses them into the perfect words...

No one creates atmosphere like Donna Tartt. I mean, look at how obsessed with Vegas we all are! I’ve never been, but after reading The Goldfinch it feels like one of my soul’s homes & I’m lowkey planning a trip.

It’s a gift so powerful it’s kind of scary-- Have you heard the Bennington podcast about Donna’s college days? (Though I’m obsessed, I do think it’s probably ethically questionable. They delve into her personal life without her consent & that’s not cool, no matter how fascinating she is.)

But anyway, in the pod, they talk about how in her first book The Secret History, her fellow classmates were astounded at how she took her characters from amongst them. And she did a scary good job of it. I’m not saying there was no artistry involved-- Of course there was! Donna’s a genius. 

Anyway, apparently she did it again in The Little Friend. I haven’t read it, mostly because I’m mad at Donna for it. According to the pod, Donna stole the story of her friend’s brother’s murder for that book-- without even warning the friend before it was published, nevermind asking her. 

I imagine Donna feels bad about it, but if she were really backed into a corner & asked why she did it, she’d shrug helplessly & sigh, “What can I say. I am thief.”

[gothdaddyheathcliff]

Am I the only one who’s convinced there’s a brideshead revisited thing going on in the TSH with richard and the twins? Like, richard projects his love onto camilla because he can’t be with charles? Maybe the paint fumes are getting to me, but I can’t be the only one:

[cherryschaos]

Am I writing my Greek and Roman culture final paper while listening to "Once Upon a Time...at Bennington College" at work?

Maybe

[an-architect-of-words]

I wanted to listen to “Once Upon a Time at Bennington” but part of me finds it more and more unethical the more I hear about it. I mean I’m willing to accept Donna Tartt could have been a less than stellar person in college, whatever. And I guess she used quirks of people she knew for some characters. But why is the world entitled to private letters and the nearly 40-year-old random rumors about her bedroom activity? Then people are like “Ooooooo she got a lawyer. She’s tried to prevent it!” Prevent the unveiling of campus gossip about her and her college boyfriend from when she was like 20? Again, why are we even entitled to that?

And this is all assuming it’s even true— so much of it sounds like it’s from vague origin or that it started as conjecture. And, I mean, the nature of tabloid-y media is to want to cause a shock/stir.

[dragon--sage]

Two questions, sorry if they are odd.

1 - Do you have a favourite book?

2 - Is this brainrot solely on BG3, or has it expanded to encompass greater Baldur’s Gate series and general Forgotten Realms lore?

Not odd in the slightest!!! I loved answering these.

(lmao break b/c i wrote a novel exposing myself for knowing nothing)

1 - Favorite book is The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I found it in a thrift store in college and became obsessed. I try and reread it every fall, and I've listened to the Once Upon a Time... at Bennington College podcast twice all the way through (explores Tartt's time at college with Bret Easton Ellis, and the accusations that she put a bunch of real life people into the book without telling them [she def did] lololo).

2 - Funny you should ask because I've just spent a WHILE going over elven lore in Forgotten Realms, because I'm trying to nail down the character history for my High Elf Tav, and I'm up to my eyeballs and maybe even over my head with new information ahahhah. I'm working with a toddler's knowledge of the lore of this world at this point, since my primary goal for months was beating the game. So now I'm excited to be able to figure out what's going on in the world I just saved lmao. I've also never played D&D, so like, really actually a baby that knows nothing, and still hoping and praying a good campaign falls into my lap irl 😂 Scared to out myself for being such a noob but I have to kill the cringe right!! Definitely want to familiarize myself with the plots of the first 2 bg games too, though that may just be an extension of the bg3 brainrot for me hahah.

[chicago-geniza]

Once Upon a Time…at Bennington College podcast cured my mental illness. I'm actually normal I just need media that caters to my extremely specific interests

[book-of-thieves]

i really recommend listening to the podcast Once Upon A Time in Bennington season 2 for The Secret History lovers. I think the second half of the 14 episodes focus more on Donna Tartt but I recommend listening to all episodes because you can see so many influences from the other notable people who were in Donna's circle (Brett E. Ellis, author of Less than Zero, American Psycho, and A Fortress of Solitude; Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and MacArthur Fellow). The influence of Vermont and of Bennington the college make their way into TSH heavily too. Im only on episode 5, but 5/5 so far!

[texasinnersmile]

screamingggggg at the revelation slash rumour in the ‘once upon a time…at bennington college’ podcast that donna tartt ‘liked having sex as a boy’

[nature-played-a-trick-on-me]

Ifell into the trap and listened to the first episode of the Bennington podcast and I'm......

[sparklygraves]

hey boreos!

I’ve started this new silly project where I write drunken college application essays (based on real questions/prompts from the universities’ websites).

this one’s for Donna Tartt’s alma mater— Bennington College. ✨🍻❄️🪦💀📖

[missroserose]

“Donna preserved them. That’s the weird thing too, right? It’s the kid sister who you’re trying to ankle—there’s that great verb, from Variety? Like, those guys, they were trying to ankle her, get rid of her, and she preserved them. However they were acting would have been totally lost, it would’ve just been a number of gestures lost to the light waves that are no longer preserved anywhere…but in Donna’s book, which is an amazing act of revenge, but like all acts of revenge that take too long, it ends up being a kind of generosity.”

—David Lipske, on Donna Tartt's college experience as reflected in her novel The Secret History

Quoted in Once Upon a Time...at Bennington College, by Lili Anolik—Episode 13: The Farmer's Granddaughter

[books-apples-socks]

after months of effort, i finally managed to listen to the the entirety of "once upon a time...in bennington college"

my review? whatever your initial experience with the first episode was, prepare to have it reaffirmed by the end. lili anolik has a clear bias (although, to her credit, she does not pretend otherwise) favouring bret easton ellis. if you entered the podcast a little perplexed by hearing his praises sung for 30 min, don't expect this to change.

i say this because although the stated purpose of the podcast is to paint a picture of the college as it was in the 80s, and to showcase how its atmosphere not only shaped, but compelled three authors (bret easton ellis, donna tartt, jonathan lethem) to write about it in detail upon graduation, what the narrative does instead is to serve as a hype piece for bret, to give a sympathetic look on jonathan, and to dismantle the donna tartt persona respectively.

which is to say, that if you don't care for bret easton ellis (and by extention his prose, his sentiments, his belief system), this really isn't the podcast for you. if you care for donna tartt, the experience is not unlike listening to a person gossip about somebody the speaker doesn't like but is terribly aware that their audience is enamoured with. and if you came looking to find an objective look at bennington college, prepare to listen to its graduates uncritical reminiscences of 80s excess and little else.

[obscurehistoricalinterests]

Lili Anolik’s million hour podcast “Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College” has fried my mind. It has so much information about Donna Tartt and the creation of The Secret History.

Some bits that got my attention:

- Richard Papen is basically an avatar of Donna. The podcast goes into an excruciating amount of detail on Donna’s past and background and makes an extremely plausible case for this;

- Richard was not originally written as being interested in Camilla. Donna Tartt makes him notice Camilla more after she receives a critique that it’s unrealistic for a boy of Richard’s age to not notice any girls. Donna glared silently at this, but incorporated the feedback;

- Bunny was the nickname of the girlfriend of one guy who left her for Donna; People who knew the situation, upon reading the book, thought it was a bit mean-spirited;

- An insane amount of detail from the book is lifted straight from reality. Backgrounds, personal characteristics, whole sentences - I had known about this, because I was no stranger to her article. But the podcast takes this to an entirely different level. Even the little drawing Bunny scribbles on the postcard, of him and Henry as Romans!

I’m on Season 2, Episode 13 and I don’t want this to end.

[an-architect-of-words]

the thing with once upon a time at bennington is that... it paints itself as trying to paint a picture of "all" bennington, but all it does is spread misinformation and cut up interviews with people who loosely knew donna tartt and bret ellis. if you want any more proof of that anolik is like... really reaching and unethical, look no farther than her insistence that michelle maitland (costume designer on succession) is the inspiration behind judy poovey. she said numerous times that she didn't know donna, and maybe her car was the basis for judy's corvette, but THERE WASNT A COSTUME DESIGN MAJOR AT BENNINGTON, and she was a theater major, and she seriously doubts donna has a third eye and could know what industry she'd go into like 10 years after TSH was published. anolik published the interview and said maitland is surely judy anyway.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2021/12/succession-secret-history-judy-poovey-connection

Geeeeeez 🤦🏻‍♀️. Yeah this was the stuff I was skeptical about. There seemed to be things that could be such crazy interesting details, but that we can’t know the full context of. And they’re just being stated as truths. I hate to talk about this podcast only having read articles about it; these are just my takes from stuff analyzing sections— but I have thoughts on Matt Jacobsen and Todd O’Neal as well. They probably did give Tartt inspiration for Bunny and Henry. Certain quotes and details seem very taken from them. And Claude Fredricks totally inspired parts of Julian and the Greek class.

That said, it seems fallacious to assume there’s a 1-to-1 comparison between these people and the characters. Just because aspects of Matt Jacobsen were seen in Bunny does not mean that everything Tartt had Bunny do was with Jacobsen in mind. Bunny is still a fictional character. She also stated here that Julian was based on her mind running wild and creating a character based on rumors about Claude Fredricks. He wasn’t literally just Claude Fredricks. Tartt also has given a huge list of books that inspired writing choices in TSH and it really checks out for certain characters. Did Donna Tartt use the fact she transferred colleges and perhaps felt like the odd man out in a Greek class when she wrote Richard? Sure. But does that mean Richard is literally her avatar and that they share every thought, and that he came from zero other inspirations— or that she never departed from herself while writing him? That’s such a stretch.

And there’s another part of this narrative that just doesn’t make much sense to me. If TSH is really a revenge story about how Donna Tartt hated her Greek class and wanted to get back at them, and Richard is her stand in to do so… why is Richard so bad? Do self indulgent revenge fantasies typically make the supposed author stand-in just as wicked as everyone else? And he ends up miserable and alone and coming to terms with that he’s not special and that he’s got California in his blood (being from Cali is a huge part of Richard and Tartt isn’t from California).

Again, I can level with the assertion that authors/artists I like are flawed (some of my favorite authors are severely flawed). But my issue here is that some of this immediately jumps out as wildly intrusive (it reminds me of a different interview where the person asks Donna Tartt a really personal question, and it really shocked me that the person didn’t feel intrusive in asking it. It’s like Tartt’s emphasis on her own privacy makes people weirdly bold.). And it definitely seems like many people in the podcast have a story they want to tell and have decided to tell, despite the discrepancies and lack of clarity. Ultimately, these people are like “please be aware we aren’t claiming this is as fact” but they’re still inserting a scandal into the world.

Finally… another thing that’s weird to me is that Tartt’s peers paint this bitter picture of her for using true happenings and facts about them in the context of her fiction, and they view it as a scummy thing. But I mean, she never addressed anyone by name, claimed a character was them, or portrayed TSH as truth about Bennington. Nobody would even know these people now or about their lives if they hadn’t revealed this stuff on the podcast. But then they go on to say stuff about Tartt that is painted as biographical and they use her real name for profit. I guess I just don’t understand how that’s not very clearly doing what they’re upset she may have done. It’s very hypocritical.

[theocseason4]

Have you listened to Once Upon A Time at Bennington College podcast? Donna tartt’s team has apparently sent cease & desist so listen while you can lol

I binged the entire thing the second I read that article lmaool

[chicago-geniza]

Just discovered the Once Upon a Time…At Bennington College podcast and I am about to get, if possible, 800% more annoying. It's like Gossip Girl but for Donna Tartt and Bret Easton Ellis at age 20 in my horrible home state doing cocaine and reading Homer and everyone is gay and homophobic and writing the Great American Novel