Donna Tartt on TikTok

TikTok loves The Secret History.

A cursory look at a certain corner of the app will show you this much. Everywhere you turn, you’ll see pouty fan castings, ominous and sexy mood reels , #darkacademia memes about “babygirl” Henry (the sociopathic heart of the novel). Users love the author, Donna Tartt, as much as they love the book itself. Look at the Secret History tag and you’ll find videos of Tartt with her effortless bob, pontificating about “The Iliad,” being, as the kids say, “mother”

Tartt’s 1992 novel is a modern classic about a group of college students at a liberal arts school a la Bennington (Tartt’s alma mater) who become caught up in a murder. It’s beloved for many reasons. It’s about beautiful people on a beautiful campus who are obscenely intelligent, wealthy, morally bankrupt, and have lots of sex with each other. It’s a whodunnit (well… more like a whydunnit) wrapped up in a gorgeous, smart package. It’s widely considered a perfect book. With the advent of BookTok (the phrase people use for the side of TikTok that talks about literature), “the youth” seem to be forgoing new releases and rediscovering this hefty book about academic hypocrisy and cult. But why? 

TikTok, being a visual and sonic medium, is obsessed with aesthetics, and BookTok is no exception. Gone are the days when a book recommendation is teed up with a simple, “I think you’d like this book because the story is interesting.” Now your recommendations must be linked to a category of aesthetics. My Year of Rest and Relaxation and Normal People are #sadgirlbooks. Station Eleven and The Handmaid’s Tale are #dystopiavibes. The Secret History (#darkacademia), it seems, has surged in popularity recently amongst my generation, in large part because it’s very easy to make sexy, moody little vids about.

But that feels like an easy answer. There are plenty of books out there that capture that mysterious vibe of dark hallways and charismatic professors and messy-haired boys in blazers. Even Harry Potter does it quite nicely. So why this book?

The Secret History is about many things. It’s about obsession. It's about the dangers of over-intellectualizing. It’s about false idols. It’s about being bisexual while wearing a pince-nez. But above all else, it’s about what lies beneath the surface. On the exterior, the characters and setting are beautiful. But underneath, there is a near-unfathomable level of rot. On some level, our protagonist, Richard Papen, seems to know this. But he can’t resist the strange classics students all the same. He falls hard for their charms and follows them straight into moral bankruptcy.

I had a TikTok account for a while. I downloaded it one day while I was sick and kept it for about three months. I found that its ability to tune in to my moods and desires, horrors and disgusts, was not dissimilar to that of a narcissistic significant other, mirroring your body language, remembering details about you, filing away your insecurities for a rainy day. The grip that it had on me was unlike anything I had experienced. When I put down my phone at night, I felt it in my head, rearranging my thoughts like furniture in a horrible new room: mountain-bike-disaster-tables and roommate-from-hell-storytime-chairs, couples-prank-couches, ingrown-hair-removal-rugs. I deleted it in the middle of the night after waking up in a cold sweat with “Angel Eyes” by ABBA (sped-up version), a popular sound on the app, playing over and over in my head like a Swedish dirge. I’ve found that TikTok’s main addictive quality is that it, like all forms of social media, imbues in us the feeling of utter and nauseating loneliness under the guise of connection. Maybe that’s why TikTokers are drawn to The Secret History. Like Richard, they are moths to the flame of a false idol. In the book, that idol is a charismatic person. In real life, 2023, that idol is an app. They, like Richard, can understand this on some level. But they, like Richard, cannot bring themselves to hit delete.

It’s funny to think about the characters of The Secret History and their obsession with gatekeeping… well… everything, and what they would do with this phenomenon of people hopping on a bandwagon and turning coveted literature into a thirty second video on an app. Let’s be real, they’d fucking hate it. They’d consider it shallow. But then, as I write this, I wonder if I’m being unfair to a trend just because it’s related to the internet and associated with young people. Maybe I’m bitter because I just turned twenty five :( At the end of the day, is all of the romanticization of aesthetic happening over on BookTok not what the characters in The Secret History do constantly? One of the ideas central to the book is that of chasing aesthetic above all else. And they do this constantly, chasing after classic literature not because of its substance but because of its surface beauty. Even Richard chooses to attend Hamden College because he likes the way it looks in a brochure. The novel opens with this: “Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that shadowy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” 

I used to think that the characters in The Secret History would hate the internet. Now, I’m sure that if they were around today they’d all have insufferable Substacks about the Pāli canon and make posts about how Paris sucks on r/RedScarePod. They’d retweet memes on X (lol) about Derrida and follow archaeologist Tik Tok-ers and listen to Bright Eyes. They’d send each other articles from The Atlantic and go to sleep at night with the comforting and terrifying hum of a sped up ABBA song playing over and over in the meat of their brains, guiding them confidently into unconsciousness.