The Secret History

WINE-BRAISED LEG of LAMB with WILD MUSHROOMS

When I was a little kid, one of my (many) strange and irrational fears was that someday every combination of musical notes would be exhausted and that new music would cease to exist. As a grown-up this is a hard thing for me to explain, which is probably why it was so hard for my parents to understand when I came to them with it. They thought it was just another quirk of mine, and I suppose it was, but I was genuinely terrified. I was in my second year of taking violin lessons when this anxiety emerged; learning to read music had somehow sparked it. My older sister was in her early teens and heavily into radio pop and hip-hop, and I took their repetitive tunes and constant samplings of older songs as proof that my fear was being realized.

In the evenings after school I would spend hours playing records from my dad’s collection, which stretched across the entirety of our living room. I found comfort in the Smiths and the English Beat, the Pogues and Dusty Springfield, while I did my homework. By the end of the night, though, I always felt that familiar dread creeping in. It’s already all been done, I thought, when I heard Keith Moon’s drumming—how could anyone ever do better than this?

Recently, while writing this book, I felt a similar anxiety creeping in. What if someday all of my creative energy just runs out? What if eventually there simply isn’t anything left to write about? What if it’s all already been done? Put in much simpler terms: I was struggling with debilitating writer’s block. In many ways, this is a scary admission, but often I find that saying out loud the things that you are most afraid of somehow makes them seem less scary (unless you finally muster enough courage to say it to your violin teacher and she just stares at you with her mouth agape). In order to admit that you have writer’s block you also have to admit that you are a writer. This is a terrifying declaration. It feels heavy and self-indulgent and pressure-filled in a way that saying “I’m a butcher” doesn’t.

Finally, I admitted all of this to a friend over beers one night. I’m sure she was expecting a much simpler answer to her question, “How’s the writing going?” but she listened carefully and responded by telling me about all of the famous writers she had heard about who had suffered terrible creative blocks throughout their careers. The conversation eventually led to Donna Tartt, whose alleged writer’s block has generated a good deal of media attention and intrigue since she published The Secret History in 1992. The book was an instant bestseller, and people hungrily awaited her next. Eleven years passed between The Secret History and The Little Friend, and rumors of writer’s block–induced breakdowns abounded.

At this point, I had not yet read any Donna Tartt. I think her name always led me to believe that her books would be of the supermarket romance variety (not that there’s anything wrong with those). My friend urged me to pick up The Secret History, so the next day I went to the bookstore and by the end of the night I had torn through almost the entire book. It’s no surprise to me that Tartt had to take eleven years between this book and her next. The anxiety of others’ influence is one thing, but I imagine the anxiety of your own influence is quite another. This book must have been a daunting one to follow up.

The book’s narrator, Richard, is reminiscent of Charles Ryder from Brideshead Revisited—a boy running from his humble beginnings in hopes of making a much more interesting life for himself. He leaves Plano, California, and arrives at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, where he becomes infatuated with a group of misfit classics students who have isolated themselves from the masses. Henry, Bunny, Charles, Camilla, and Francis spend their days studying ancient Greek with their charming and enigmatic professor, Julian, drinking massive amounts of alcohol, and spending money faster than their parents can make it. After a few short weeks Richard infiltrates the group and quickly finds himself in way over his head.

Things come to a boiling point when Henry, the group’s leader, decides that they have to kill Bunny because he knows a secret that could destroy them all (this is given away in the very first sentence, so I haven’t ruined anything for you). Henry begins experimenting with poisonous wild mushrooms, trying to determine how many it would take to kill a person Bunny’s size. That night, Richard is invited to Julian’s house for dinner, and the reader, unsure at this point who in this dysfunctional group can be trusted, watches as Julian presents him with a dinner of roasted lamb and potatoes, leeks and peas with fennel, and lastly, a heaping plate of Henry’s wild mushrooms, “steaming in a red wine sauce that smelled of coriander and rue.”

The day I finished the book I got an email from the friend who had recommended it. It was a press release stating that Donna Tartt would be publishing a new novel with Little, Brown that year—her third book in more than twenty years. (This, of course, was The Goldfinch, which would go on to win the Pulitzer.) When asked what took her so long, Tartt brushed off the rumors of writer’s block and unapologetically and succinctly answered, “Writing takes time.”

THE SECRET HISTORY

Wine-Braised Leg of Lamb with Wild Mushrooms

Use whatever nonpoisonous varieties of mushrooms you like. I used dried lobster mushrooms, morels, and porcinis and fresh hedgehog mushrooms, yellowfoot chanterelles, and maitakes.

Serves 6

1 (3-pound) bone-in lamb leg steak

Kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper

5 carrots, peeled and cut into chunks

1 pound fingerling or red potatoes, scrubbed

4 ounces dried mushrooms

1 bunch rosemary

1 bunch thyme

4 cups chicken stock

1 (750-milliliter) bottle dry red wine

10 tablespoons unsalted butter

4 small shallots, minced

4 garlic cloves, minced

8 ounces fresh wild mushrooms

Crusty bread, for serving

Generously season the lamb steak all over with salt and pepper and allow it to sit out until it reaches room temperature, about 40 minutes.

Preheat the oven to 300°F.

Heat a large skillet over medium-high heat and sear the lamb until it forms a nice crust, about 3 minutes per side.

Place the lamb in a Dutch oven and add the carrots, potatoes, dried mushrooms, rosemary, and thyme (reserve a few sprigs of the thyme for cooking the fresh mushrooms). Cover with the chicken stock and red wine.

In the same skillet that you used to sear the lamb, heat 4 tablespoons of the butter over medium heat and add the reserved thyme sprigs. Cook the shallots and garlic until the shallots are translucent—about 8 to 10 minutes. Add them to the Dutch oven, along with 4 more tablespoons of the butter, cut into pieces.

Cover the pot, put it in the oven, and cook until the meat is falling off the bone, about 5 hours.

Strain the stew, reserving the braising liquid. Pick out the herb sprigs and place the meat, potatoes, carrots, and dried mushrooms on a dish.

Place the braising liquid in a medium saucepan and simmer over medium heat until reduced by half, about 20 minutes.

While the sauce is reducing, heat the remaining 2 tablespoons butter in a sauté pan over medium heat. Add the fresh mushrooms and reserved thyme sprigs. Salt and pepper the mushrooms liberally and cook until they are crisp at the edges and have released most of their liquid.

To serve, spoon the mushrooms into a serving bowl, top with the lamb, carrots, and potatoes, cover in red wine sauce, and season with salt and pepper to taste. Good bread will be necessary for mopping up every last bit.