Does the book ‘The Secret History’ compare to a modern college life? 

Almost as far back as I can remember, college has occupied a place in my mind. By age seven, I was ready to attend college, pay taxes and work an office job (albeit in a romanticized, everything-works-out-for-me world). Before I had even come close to graduating elementary school, I decided that college was going to be better than elementary, middle, and high school combined. 

My idea of college would have made some Hallmark executive rich if they had just copied and pasted it onto the script of a small-town weird kid coming-of-age movie. I was convinced that the start of college would mark the end of all of my frustration; it was the place where I’d finally receive the freedom I’d been starved of, where I’d finally get the motivation to excel in school, where I’d finally find people who genuinely liked and accepted me. 

Then I grew up, got out of middle school and into therapy, and realized that life isn’t so bad once you find the right crowd to go about it with. All my life I had dreamed of running away from my small town and into a safe haven of higher education, and yet as I approached my senior year of high school, I realized that going away was the last thing I wanted to do.

Don’t get me wrong, I wanted to further my education as much as the next guy, but not if it meant losing the joy and companionship I found myself surrounded with after years of stumbling through life without it.

Then, between bouts of senioritis and debilitating anticipatory grief, I stumbled upon Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History.”

For those unaware, “The Secret History” is an inverted detective story, or a story in which the commitment of the crime is revealed in the beginning, with the rest of the story focusing on how and why the crime was committed. 

Written by Donna Tartt and released in 1992 as her debut novel, “The Secret History” tells the story of the murder of Bunny Corcoran, one of the six Classics students at Hampden College, through the eyes of his fellow student and the novel’s protagonist, Richard Papen. Throughout the novel, Papen reflects on his time at Hampden and within the company of the other Classics students, all of whom are being manipulated and isolated by their professor, Julien Morrow. 

Despite finishing all 592 pages in three days, and concluding that it was the best thing I had ever read and everything I wanted to exhibit in my own writing style, Tartt’s masterful way of storytelling is only half the reason “The Secret History” struck me as hard as it did. The most impactful parts are the ones that, in my opinion, get overlooked the most, mainly the descriptions of simple day-to-day academic tasks. 

Between the passages in Latin and literal murder, Tartt’s protagonist studying or writing a paper seems pretty insignificant. Yet when I settled down to re-read this book after arriving back home from my senior trip, my room bare and in boxes, the strings of childhood officially cut, those details were the ones that I couldn’t seem to escape; it was like looking into a crystal ball and seeing a future that could be mine within it (minus the murder, of course). 

After a year of dreading any faint notion of college, I started to change my mind. While I knew my life wouldn’t suddenly become a detective story at a private college in New England, I had hope that it would develop at least some of the aestheticism that seemed to accompany everything the novel’s characters did.

I concluded that these next four years would go one of two ways; either I would become as motivated and organized as the ‘studytok’ accounts I followed, or I would end up like Richard Papen.

Now, three months into my second semester, I can see that I’ve become a little bit of both. While I have developed a newfound sense of personal responsibility, I’ve also fallen victim to a lot of the same struggles Richard Papen did: isolation, loneliness, academic pressure, and a struggle for identity. So far, I’ve been able to avoid the murder and moral corruption that Papen also faced, but I’ll update if any of that changes. 

To me, “The Secret History” is one of the greatest stories of all time, and I would recommend it to anyone at any point in their life, not just college freshmen. Though, if you are just beginning your college journey, I would recommend it even more; maybe you’ll walk away from it with a new outlook on academia. And if that new outlook encompasses studying Greek and Roman classics with five other pretentious students, one of which you eventually murder, I won’t judge.