>>24203417
It's essentially a hit piece/murder fantasy towards one of Tartt's fellow students (the man on right in the photo) at Bennington College. She didn't major in classics but was acquainted with the students because she dated the man on the left; even thanked him in the acknowledgement page. Just like Richard she wanted to be a part of the group (even started wearing blazers and ties) but wasn't fully accepted partly because she was only a freshman when the other, I believe, were already seniors, partly because of her poor grasp of Greek. Some of her seething is even carried over to the book if you read how Bunny treated her self-insert lone female member of the group.

Donna dumped her bf after the book got picked up and became a lawyer, the man whom Henry was inspired by started a restaurant in New York, don't know what happened to the guy Bunny was based on. Later he said after the book was released:
>I called my mother and said, “I’ve been caricatured in a book, and my character gets killed.” And she said, “No, no. No one would ever kill you, not even in print, no.” Then she read the book and said, “That’s you all right.” I wore wire-rimmed glasses like Bunny. I had dyslexia like Bunny. [...] I’d invite people to lunch and then realize I didn’t have any money, something dear old Bunny does. I was kind of a horrible bounder, though in my case it was never intentional.
>Ten years after Bennington, not long after The Secret History came out, I met Paul at his office in New York. He said that Donna had lived with him while he was at Harvard Law and she was writing, and then dumped him like a hot potato when the book was accepted. He was very wounded talking about her. I long felt that Donna was the Yoko Ono of the Greek class. If she couldn’t be part of our tight group, she would destroy it. And that’s what happened. Our friendships fell apart.

Henry's model later said:
>Matt (Bunny) didn’t like Donna. I liked her to the degree that I knew her, but I found her evasive, a bit impenetrable. The truth is, I didn’t think too deeply about her until her book came out years later.
>The Secret History isn’t so much a work of fiction. It’s a work of thinly veiled reality—a roman à clef. When it came out, Claude and Matt and I got endless calls. Everybody was saying, “Oh, did you know Donna just wrote a book about Claude and you all? And Claude is Julian and Matt is Bunny and you’re Henry.”

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Henry did nothing wrong.Bunny had it coming.

Henry did nothing wrong.
Bunny had it coming.