It started because I'd found my signed copy of The Goldfinch in a box in the attic. From there, I fell down the Donna Tartt rabbit hole and started wondering why one of my favourite writers hadn't published a novel in more than a decade.
Well, here we are again. On 23 September 2026, it will be thirteen years since The Goldfinch was first published. Thirteen years without a new Donna Tartt novel and, this time, we've officially entered uncharted territory.
.png "Two writers, two very different personalities and the problem with pretending the journalist isn't there")
Mailer was loud, combative, theatrical and seemingly incapable of entering a room without eventually becoming one of the principal subjects under discussion. He ran for mayor of New York. He got into fights. He appeared on television and argued with people. He wrote about politics, war, sex, boxing and himself, frequently managing to combine several of these subjects at once. Norman Mailer didn't simply have a public persona. At times, Norman Mailer appeared to be the principal character in the ongoing Norman Mailer production. He was always the main character.
Didion was something else entirely. Small, watchful, controlled. Dark glasses, cigarette, notebook. She cultivated the impression of somebody sitting quietly at the edge of the room while everyone else made the potentially catastrophic mistake of forgetting she was there.
In In Cold Blood, Capote took the murder of the Clutter family in Kansas and transformed it into literature. He created suspense, reconstructed conversations, moved between perspectives and, most troublingly, made us understand Perry Smith.
Capote removed himself from the book, but he was everywhere in its choices. He decided where we looked, what we knew and when we knew it.
So after writing about In Cold Blood, I was left with another question. What happens if the writer tries to get out of the way?
Thirteen years after Capote's book appeared, Norman Mailer offered an answer. Sort of.
Can you ever really trust a writer? Rachel Cusk's Life of M got me thinking about it. Joan Didion provided the warning. And Truman Capote wandered briefly into the argument, having spectacularly demonstrated what can happen when a writer's friends discover that the funny little man at their dinner table has been paying considerably more attention than they realised.
.png "Rachel Cusk, Natalie Portman and the ethics of fiction")
'Writers are always selling somebody out.'
It is a wonderfully typical Didion sentence. It's cold, precise and just self-aware enough to make the betrayal sound almost professional.
.png "The comeback of the literary antihero: Why we love flawed protagonists")
Modern literary fiction has taken a rather different path.
Today, some of the most memorable novels are populated by characters who are selfish, manipulative, emotionally detached or quietly destructive. They lie. They disappoint us. Sometimes they commit terrible acts. More often than not, they simply refuse to become the people we hope they will be.