Better listen to that Bennington podcast now—before Donna Tartt squashes it.
If you haven’t listened to Lili Anolik’s podcast about the literary history of Bennington—Once Upon A Time…at Bennington College, which began last month and is based on her excellent 2019 Esquire piece about the school and the Gen X literary stars (Donna Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, Bret Easton Ellis) it spawned in the 80s—you might want to hurry up.
According to Page Six, the notoriously private Donna Tartt’s literary agents—London’s RCW—have sent letters to Apple, asking them to take down the podcast. While these letters are not legal documents, they “warn the podcast’s creators not to use any ‘false, misleading or otherwise inaccurate statement’ about Tartt that could be made by guests,” and also warn “against using any of Tartt’s published works without permission, or any of her private school records.”
“All I know is that Donna gave a polite decline when asked to participate in the podcast,” Anaolik told Page Six. “Then my producer started hearing from her lawyer and from her publisher’s lawyers. . . My podcast is—at least in part—about how Donna Tartt wrote the American version of Brideshead Revisited, i.e., The Secret History, because she was living the American version of Brideshead Revisited. While at Bennington, she inhabited a world that was very moneyed, very louche, very sexually ambiguous. The podcast is quite admiring of her, but it is also quite revealing of her.”
As if you needed another reason to check it out!
