For Wordfest’s opening act this is a sure way to set the trail blazing: the talk is Donna Tartt’s third in England in the past eleven years. It’s also the first time she’s spoken in Cambridge, one of the lucky few to have made the shortlist of stops on the tour of her latest novel The Goldfinch. 

In person Tartt is small but strong. Her voice, a soft drawl, fills the chamber with ease. She pauses frequently and considers her words carefully. Her writing is a lengthy process, but the results are certainly worth the wait. She’s a woman of craft, for whom the writing process consists of research and discovery. She has previously explored art and furniture restoration, Las Vegas suburbs and the canals of Amsterdam. She desires to inspire excitement, where her tales provide alternative worlds for exploration, “a world to lose yourself in”. She’s fuelled by “the germ of the story”, confessing “it’s all I really care about”.

Stories inspire us, she says, and starting from childhood they shape our identities. In fact, Tartt professes that there’s “something of Peter Pan in every book I’ve ever written”. She reveals that as a child she thought books “were like clouds”, essential parts of the world. The power of reading is its engagement, where “You can put down a book and be changed by it”. In her view books remain unthreatened by technology, remaining “a great refuge” in society. She maintains that novels are a medium superior even to film where we remain voyeurs “always looking from outside”, whereas reading allows us to “know another person from the inside” making fiction “the most spiritual of all arts”. 

Tartt endeavours to make something “timeless”, describing the process of drafting and editing as a meticulous task of “rubbing out”. Refusing to be attached to a specific historical period, she asserts a distain for ‘pigeon holing’: “I dislike the whole idea of genre”. Instead she prefers to view a novel as a “big house” with “lots of rooms and lots of tasks...[where] there’s always a lot to do”. 

Tonight she’s “very glad to be away from paper”, describing her drafting process as many “colour coded snow drifts”. It was when she was on tour that the idea for The Goldfinch first emerged; experiences from the results of one book sparking ideas for the next. Present events can also apparently shed light on existing works: the final questioner of the evening inquired whether the remnants of Homer’s Odyssey were deliberate, an allusion that was new to Tartt herself. Events like this foster a dialogue between reader and writer. It’s something wonderful to watch.