The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

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The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith

3.35 of 5 stars 3.35 · rating details · 263 ratings · 93 reviews

Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite "hero-criminal", talented Tom Ripley. In this revolution ary biography, Joan Schenkar paints a riveting portrait— from Highsmith’s birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, Strangers On a Train, to her long, strange, self-ex...more

Hardcover, 704 pages

Published December 8th 2009 by St. Martin's Press (first published November 10th 2009)

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Dec 30, 2010 Jessica rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

Though initially (for at least the first half), Schenkar's tone grated on me, I did ultimately come to admire her work. She seemed kinder (less presumptuous) to Highsmith in her old age and self-imposed isolation in her fortress of a house in Switzerland. I think Schenkar felt sorry for her--one does--and her admiration comes through more. Still, Schenkar reminds me of the sort of person who'd drive you crazy if she were your friend: always presuming to know what you're thinking and what your mo...more Though initially (for at least the first half), Schenkar's tone grated on me, I did ultimately come to admire her work. She seemed kinder (less presumptuous) to Highsmith in her old age and self-imposed isolation in her fortress of a house in Switzerland. I think Schenkar felt sorry for her--one does--and her admiration comes through more. Still, Schenkar reminds me of the sort of person who'd drive you crazy if she were your friend: always presuming to know what you're thinking and what your motivations are and were...
I do admire the book because there will never be a more thorough biography written on Highsmith. The reading (lists, journals, notebooks, novels, stories, letters, etc) and interviews Schenkar did are prodigious.

Here's an example of her irksome tone:
After a paragraph discussing Patricia Highsmith and Jane Bowles (they knew one another), Schenkar writes: "Although sexually uninterested in Jane, Pat was still alert to the opportunity: '[I]f we go to Africa no doubt something would happen.'" (246). Schenkar then goes on to say: "Luckily their African trip never came off. Jane Bowles had phobias about trains, tunnels, bridges, elevators and making decisions, while Pat's phobias included, but were not confined to, noise, space, cleanliness, and food, as well as making decisions. A journey to the Dark Continent by Patricia Highsmith and Jane Bowles in each other's unmediated company doesn't bear thinking about." (247)

And in this way, Jane Schenkar dismisses what would have surely been a fascinating, if aborted, journey by two of the most talented and original writers of their time.

------------------------
This hefty biography--I am not yet halfway through--is both fascinating and annoying. Fascinating because Highsmith is such a great writer and so enigmatic and contradictory a person; annoying because the author is so damn thorough (no slip of paper or scrap of conversation escapes her notice) and intent on reading nefarious intentions into all of these. Hence, something as simple as the fact that Highsmith loved to iron her clothes, that some of her story ideas came to her while she was ironing, is met with lots of speculation about Highsmith's penchant for creased, sharp clothing, and yet (I paraphrase) "Highsmith's villians were never murdered with an iron as a weapon..."
Huh? Schenkar seems oblivious to the fact that many writers get their best ideas while engaged in some mundane chore, be it dishwashing, driving, showering, lawn mowing, as the body is engaged but the mind is not... Any writer could have told her this.
Highsmith, of course, is not just any writer, but Schenkar too often looks for murderous impulses, treating her as if she is evil, practically homicidal.
Highsmith is always "Pat," as if biographer and subject are on the most intimate terms imaginable... (less)

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Dec 30, 2009 Elaine rated it 1 of 5 stars Recommends it for: masochists

This is maybe the worst biography I ever read. First of all, the woman can't write. Clunky, repetitive and inapt. Words like quondam and intermitted (as a verb) or the phrase avant la lettre which draw attention to themselves because of their oddness are used over and over again so that they start to seem like tics or vocabulary exercises (use "quondam" in 5 sentences).

Second, the conjecture and over-striving to make this something more dramatic than a biography of one of the foremost suspense/...more This is maybe the worst biography I ever read. First of all, the woman can't write. Clunky, repetitive and inapt. Words like quondam and intermitted (as a verb) or the phrase avant la lettre which draw attention to themselves because of their oddness are used over and over again so that they start to seem like tics or vocabulary exercises (use "quondam" in 5 sentences).

Second, the conjecture and over-striving to make this something more dramatic than a biography of one of the foremost suspense/lesbian/female/expatriate (pick your adjectives)writers -- which should have been an exciting enough project -- are painfully annoying, and border on offensive. She repeatedly suggests that Pat's loves, ways of dealing with life etc. were "criminal" or "murderous" in an overstrained attempt to wed life and art. The evidence (at least what she shows us) doesn't even come close to supporting her indictment -- promiscuous when young, lonely when old? Check. Drunk, suffering from OCD and social awkwardness? Also check. Criminal? WTF??? One seriously bizarre episode is when she suggests that the suicide of a woman Pat glimpsed but never spoke to was somehow caused by Pat or Pat's art. Trying too hard, methinks.

Third, the compulsive listing of detail (does anyone care to know that one 1 of a dozen people listed as a sometime neighbor of Pat Highsmith was the granddaughter of some not-so-prominent industrialist or the fourth cousin of Teddy Roosevelt? I don't) makes your eyes glaze over. This is not 560 action-packed pages -- there is way too much nonsense here. Pat had OCD, and her biographer seems to have some form of the same. But what was her editor's excuse? More seriously though, the detail substitutes for description or for conveying any real mood or atmosphere. None of Pat's lovers or friends emerges as any sort of a "character" -- the writer has no talent for finding the TELLING detail, only for telling all the details. For a book largely set in lesbian NY of the 1940s, and which repeatedly alludes to Pat's sense of guilt, shame, etc. over her lesbianism, there is absolutely no time -- not one page -- spent trying to set the social stage or to convey any sense of what this world was actually like (or of how it felt to be a lesbian child in Texas in the 30s, for that matter). Rather an endless parade of women (who all know each other -- how?) leap in and out of bed with each other and the occasional man. There's obviously a fascinating social story here (bars? Barnard? both?) but we're not meant to know -- at least not from this book.

Fourth, the writer asserts at the beginning that she can't tell a linear story about Highsmith (why?) and then proceeds to use that as an excuse for repetition, doubling back, and bizarre leaps from topic to topic. The effect is bewildering -- and more "criminally" as the author would say -- you think that she will double back to seemingly important topics (the love affair she claims was Pat's most important and most lasting, the critical reception/sales/success or lack thereof of Pat's more important books) but she never does.

What a huge waste of time. I felt that she wanted me to dislike Highsmith, or to fear her, when I was done. I didn't. I only wanted to reread her books to get rid of the horrible annoyed feeling this biography left me with, and to offer an apology to Highsmith for having spent so much time in the company of this horrible woman, her biographer. (less)

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Apr 28, 2013 Craig rated it 2 of 5 stars

Pernicious and nosey as it sounds the attraction of a writer's private life and potential revelations about the same, will induce me to, and others, I'm sure too, 'stretch the binding' on what is often mere titillation.
The writer flits through the decades of Ms. Highsmith's life with a total disregard for chronology. Some will have no problem with this, for me, it was irritatingly unconventional.
There is an immense amount of research on display and the reader is given a microscopic view of Patri...more

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Oct 01, 2012 Carl Rollyson rated it 5 of 5 stars

Patricia Highsmith is best known for her "Ripliad" -- five novels featuring an engaging murderer, Tom Ripley. This criminally attractive man is the enemy of all things conventional, as was his creator.

Moments before her death, Highsmith urged a visiting friend to leave, repeating, "Don't stay, don't stay." Highsmith wanted nothing more than to die alone, according to her biographer, who concludes, "Everything human was alien to her."

Highsmith, a native Texan, was born restless, her mother said....more Patricia Highsmith is best known for her "Ripliad" -- five novels featuring an engaging murderer, Tom Ripley. This criminally attractive man is the enemy of all things conventional, as was his creator.

Moments before her death, Highsmith urged a visiting friend to leave, repeating, "Don't stay, don't stay." Highsmith wanted nothing more than to die alone, according to her biographer, who concludes, "Everything human was alien to her."

Highsmith, a native Texan, was born restless, her mother said. The novelist kept moving to new venues all over Europe, acquiring and discarding female lovers and denouncing all of them. They were poor substitutes for the mother she loved and hated.

This mother fixation was just one of the Highsmith passions that provoke biographer Joan Schenkar to eschew a chronological narrative. Instead, the chapters in "The Talented Miss Highsmith" (St. Martin's Press, $35) are organized around Highsmith's obsessions.

The result of this unorthodox approach is an intricate, novel-like structure that suits Schenkar's own wit. Highsmith's mother, Mary, makes several entertaining entrances -- for example, arriving in London to see her daughter "with rather less warning than the Blitz."

"Miss Highsmith" is full of wonderfully realized scenes, like the opening chapter describing with mesmerizing, miraculous detail exactly how Highsmith composed her work. She gripped her "favorite Parker fountain pen, hunched her shoulders over her roll-top desk -- her oddly jointed arms and enormous hands were long enough to reach the back of the roll while she was still seated."

Highsmith's love life is described with loving specificity garnered from sources who do not wish to be identified by their real names.

"In the delicate balance of competing truths that biography is always on the verge of upsetting, both the living and dead deserve a little protection from each other," Schenkar writes.

This panoply of lovers is new material not to be found in other books, which also failed to unearth Highsmith's surprising seven-year career writing for comic books.

For those who want the straight dope, there is a substantial appendix titled "Just the Facts." But Schenkar is at pains to reiterate that Highsmith did not develop over time; indeed, the biographer notes that Highsmith "forged chronologies to give order to her life, altering the record of her life and the purport of her writing to do so."

You don't have to buy Schenkar's thesis. In "Beautiful Shadow," Andrew Wilson produced a rather good chronological biography of Highsmith.

Nevertheless, Schenkar's methods and deep research into Highsmith's deceptive practices have yielded one of the year's best literary lives, which is also a bracing rebuke to the usual way we read biography.(less)

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Mar 23, 2012 Ronald rated it 2 of 5 stars

I received this book as a gift for helping out as a volunteer at a Bookmooch booth during a library convention in Puerto Rico. I had no idea who Patricia Highsmith was, although I had seen the movie "The Talented Mr. Ripley," which I later discovered she wrote. Frankly, the book is so tedious that I could not finish it, a rare occurrence for me. I tend to read everything voraciously, a habit picked up in grad school when working on my Ph.D. I was always afraid I would miss something and that det...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Robert rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

The subject of this biography is Patricia Highsmith, the author of the "The Talented Mr. Ripley", "Strangers on a Train", and "The Price of Salt", all published before she was 35 years old. Joan Schenkar has done enormous research, and she's an astute reader of Highsmith's novels. Shenkar identifies the several themes that thread through Highsmith's novels -- the mirrored personalities of pairs of characters, same yet opposite; the barely suppressed homosexuality; the thin line between love and...more The subject of this biography is Patricia Highsmith, the author of the "The Talented Mr. Ripley", "Strangers on a Train", and "The Price of Salt", all published before she was 35 years old. Joan Schenkar has done enormous research, and she's an astute reader of Highsmith's novels. Shenkar identifies the several themes that thread through Highsmith's novels -- the mirrored personalities of pairs of characters, same yet opposite; the barely suppressed homosexuality; the thin line between love and murderous hatred -- and she identifies their sources in Highsmith's own personality and experience persuasively. Additionally, Highsmith was part of an incredibly interesting time and place -- in Greenwich Village among writers and artists (Capote, Paul Bowles, and many others not quite so famous) in the 1950s. She was also openly lesbian ("openly" for that era) in a time when "gay" and "pride" were rarely found in the same sentence, and her sexuality and serial failed relationships actively fueled her creativity.

Patricia Highsmith is an incredibly interesting subject but for me, and the fault may be mine, this book did not live up to its potential for a few reasons.

I had a problem with the biographer's choice to tell the Highsmith story thematically, rather than chronologically. Themes such as Highsmith's obsessions with alter egos, obsessions with objects, her stinginess, her affairs and relationships -- each theme is covered in a set of chapters more or less a-chronologically. This takes events out of time, and that was troubling for me as a reader. I lost the order of events many times and found myself in the middle of events without knowing whether Highsmith was 30 or 50, in her first relationship or her 10th, famous author or struggling graduate. A closer reader may not have the same trouble that I did. Things were made even less clear by the biographer's asides, especially in the first chapters. She breaks mid-sentence, refers to events past or future, and may even break her aside with another aside. When a narrative is not chronological to begin with, this only adds to reading difficulty.

Also, in my opinion, the balance between research and narrative feels weighted in this book too much toward research. Some aspect of Highsmith's character is illuminated with a story by an acquaintance. Then another story illuminates it from a slightly different angle. Then another (pushing the book to nearly 700 pages with index and notes). The details pile up as though the biographer can't stand to waste them. Schenkar is a good writer when she allows herself -- she can be funny and sarcastic and, as in the final chapter, moving -- but too much in this book I felt she was not selective enough in her inclusions.

Ultimately, though, this is a decent book about a fascinating person.

(less)

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Jul 15, 2010 Jamie rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: adult, biography

If you know me, or follow my reviews, you know that my #1 favorite kind of book is a juicy biography of the category "Smart Women, Foolish Choices."

I've never read any Highsmith, though I have seen Strangers on a Train, but I doubted that would make her any less interesting to me. And this tale is SORDID! Think: Lindsay Lohan, as Ms. Highsmith is basically a drunken slutty lesbian for most of her youth. However, much of this could also have been due to the time period, as it was impossible for p...more

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Apr 22, 2010 Talulah Mankiller rated it 4 of 5 stars

I have a confession to make: before I ever read Middlemarch, I devoured a biography of George Eliot. And although I’m not terribly enamored of her poetry (except for that one in the Sweet Valley High book where the girl tries coke and DIES) I’ve plowed through Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I have biographies of George Sand and Collette sitting on my shelves; I’ve never read anything by either of them. I like reading about authors, even (sometimes especially) authors whose w...more I have a confession to make: before I ever read Middlemarch, I devoured a biography of George Eliot. And although I’m not terribly enamored of her poetry (except for that one in the Sweet Valley High book where the girl tries coke and DIES) I’ve plowed through Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. I have biographies of George Sand and Collette sitting on my shelves; I’ve never read anything by either of them. I like reading about authors, even (sometimes especially) authors whose work I’m not familiar with. Why? Simple. Authors are FUCKING WEIRD.

There are, of course, boring authors out there, but they don’t tend to attract biographers; I suppose that if you’re going to write a 500 page doorstop about somebody, that somebody had damn well better be high on entertainment value. Whatever the reason, author biographies amuse me deeply, which is why despite never having read a single one of her books (nope, not even The Talented Mr. Ripley), I picked up Joan Schenkar’s new biography of Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Miss Highsmith.

First (and briefly!), the critique of the book itself: Schenkar doesn’t go with a strictly chronological approach, which means that we start somewhere in the middle and often cover the same ground several times. This didn’t annoy me TOO much, but perhaps because of this approach, there were certain things that Schenkar kept alluding to without ever fully explaining. The most glaring example is that of Highsmith’s medical problems, including anemia and some sort of eating disorder–Schenkar admits that they’re both things that had a huge impact on Highsmith, but she only discusses them in passing and never dedicates any real analysis to them. ANNOYING. Otherwise, it was a pretty good book, for the simple reason that Patricia Highsmith was an absolutely APPALLING human being.

Reading between the lines, I get the impression that the only way Highsmith was able to maintain her numerous and quite robust friendships was through pity: she convinced everyone she knew that, because she was so fucking awful, there was no way–ABSOLUTELY NO FUCKING WAY–that she’d ever be able to get someone to tell her the bus schedule, let alone be her friend. Although most of her friends talked about how intelligent and attractive she was, there was always an undercurrent of, “And she was so damn AWKWARD, you just had to feel sorry for her!” Truth was, she wasn’t just “awkward”: she was a terrible person, and the reason everyone always felt that she was ill-at-ease is because she was busy making them feel ill-at-ease–usually through violent sexism, racism, or some combination of the two. Schenkar deals with this by adopting a coolly amused, slightly detached authorial tone; every time Patricia does something dreadful (about every quarter of a page or so), Schenkar’s reaction can best be summarized as, “Oh, that’s just so HIGHSMITH of her.” Apparently, Highsmith’s friends coped with her in much the same way, with an added dollop of pity and a little smattering of “Aren’t we so KIND to have PUT UP WITH HER.”

You’re…something to have put up with her, but I’m not sure “kind” is the right word for it.

Anyway, if anyone around you tries to claim that racism is a mental illness, just hand them this book. Highsmith hated everyone who wasn’t her, essentially, but she saved most of her vitriol for the Jews and a good bit of it for blacks (the second’s not surprising–she was born in the 1920s and was directly descended from slave owners who missed the “good old days”). Through the use of Highsmith’s private writings, Schenkar makes it painfully clear that although all this hate probably started with her family and her social milieu, Highsmith continued and extended it because of her own feelings of inferiority and entitlement. She was a gifted person surrounded by other, even more gifted people, and she was never the specialist snowflake, not by a long shot. Academically, she scraped her way into college, and she scraped her way back out again. She wasn’t a bad student, but she wasn’t a stellar one; she would spend the rest of her life writing privately in five separate languages without ever mastering any besides English. She was, in short, a highly gifted person, but she was never going to be the MOST gifted person, and instead of accepting that and moving the fuck on with her life, she let her feelings of inferiority consume her. So much of her racism was sour grapes: she had Jewish friends (and Jewish girlfriends–for those of you not in the know, she was gay), but the second her Jewish friends and/or lovers outmatched her in something, she fell back on her old friend: virulent antisemitism.

That’s not a mental illness, guys: that’s a person who is unable to accept that they are not and never will be smarter than everyone else on earth. That’s a person who would rather slander and revile an entire ethnic group than admit to personal limitations. That’s not mental illness–that’s assholery, pure and simple. And we can’t make a pill for that, unfortunately.

Recommended for: Highsmith once threw a rat through someone’s window “as a joke.” No shit. YOU CANNOT MAKE THAT STUFF UP. If you enjoy bad authorial behavior, you’ll DEFINITELY enjoy this.(less)

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Feb 20, 2010 Book Calendar rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

This is a very in depth biography of Patricia Highsmith. Joan Schenkar draws from interviews, books, and the 38 Cahiers (spiral bound notebooks) and 18 Diaries of Patricia Highsmith kept at the Swiss Literary Archives. The book itself is 683 pages long with notes, bibliography, index, a map of where she went in Manhattan, diagrams, a timeline of her life, and two extensive sections of black and whit...more

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Feb 06, 2010 Ann rated it 3 of 5 stars

Thank you, Emmi, for alerting me to this book.

There have been many theories about Patricia Highsmith, i.e., that she had Asperger's Syndrome, etc. Allow me to add mine: could it have been possible that Pat Highsmith was transgendered?

This book adds valuable information about Highsmith and for reading Highsmith, and because the writer had access to thousands of pages of Pat's writing ideas and plans, and her diaries, it provides exciting information not available before now.

The bio is organized...more Thank you, Emmi, for alerting me to this book.

There have been many theories about Patricia Highsmith, i.e., that she had Asperger's Syndrome, etc. Allow me to add mine: could it have been possible that Pat Highsmith was transgendered?

This book adds valuable information about Highsmith and for reading Highsmith, and because the writer had access to thousands of pages of Pat's writing ideas and plans, and her diaries, it provides exciting information not available before now.

The bio is organized in an unusual way - Schenkar has identified several major themes of Highsmith's life and linked them to her writing: double and/or forged identities, her obsession with objects and money, her endless gravitation toward difficult, emotionally violent love affairs and her serious ambivalence about her sexuality, her hatred/love of her mother, her attraction to women coupled with her misogyny.

These are all excellent choices with which to examine her life and her work. The biographical info, "The Facts," is relegated to the end, and is a refreshing change from most biographies, in which you have to slog through interesting, but ultimately irrelevant info about the subject's parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. However, it is a bit difficult to maintain the context of time because there is a ton of jumping back and forth between years and locations, which is something a traditionally organized biography gives the reader.

One of the best sections is towards the end of the book, when Shenkar sums up the aging of Highsmith's lesbian circle of the 40s, 50s, 60s. She was part of (to the extent she could be part of anything) the moneyed class of closeted lesbians active during that time. Schenkar's summary of the correspondence between Highsmith and her ex-lovers and her friends is very poignant, as these women from all over the world write to each other about final illnesses, mental failings and all of the other breakdowns that accompany aging.

The work could have used some serious editing, however. Schenkar's sentences are packed with multiple references, asides, paranthetical observations, etc., all of which compete for your focus. For example (and there are hundreds of sentences like this one): "Michael Andrews' famous 1962 painting, The Colony Room, features eight of Muriel Belcher's Colony Room regulars, including the painter Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, their muse and model Henrietta Moraes (then Maggi Hambling's muse and model), and Muriel Belcher herself with her Cuban lover Carmel." None of these poeple reappear again in any noteworthly way, yet, the reader is left to plow through this example without knowing just how important a role Belcher, Bacon, Freud, Moraes and Hambling play in the story of Pat Highsmith. (Since "Carmel's" last name is missing, you gratefully don't have to remember her.) The upshot of all this is that they are discussed for only two more paragraphs before Schenkar drops them, and you never hear of them again. I consider myself pretty skilled at reading nonfiction (except for science), and I found this a major annoyance. It's one of the reasons I took a star away from this review, and only gave it three (take that, Joan Schenkar and your editor!!)

There many ways to look at Highsmith, and in this book, you get them all from her contemporaries, friends, business associates. I came away feeling sad for her. Her alcoholism and her self-hatred/rejection made for a sad life, although I may just be projecting. Maybe she wasn't sad, who knows? I don't think Schenkar likes Highsmith, honestly, and I wish she had even a small understanding of what it must have been like to be born in 1921 and live as a lesbian during a very repressive time. Perhaps if she had considered Highsmith in this context, Schenkar wouldn't have been so corrosively hard on her subject.

Recommended: Ripley series, The Blunderer, Strangers on a Train.(less)

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Jan 13, 2010 Tony rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography

Schenkar, Joan. THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. (2009). ****. This is not an easy read, nor a short one. It took me a while to get through this 600-page epic on the life of Miss Highsmith. Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, and died in 1995 in Locarno. In between, she managed to write an astounding number of books: novels, short stories, travel fiction, criticism, and scholarly books on writing. Her first book, “Strangers on a Tra...more Schenkar, Joan. THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith. (2009). ****. This is not an easy read, nor a short one. It took me a while to get through this 600-page epic on the life of Miss Highsmith. Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas, and died in 1995 in Locarno. In between, she managed to write an astounding number of books: novels, short stories, travel fiction, criticism, and scholarly books on writing. Her first book, “Strangers on a Train,” was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock. She is best known in this country for her Ripley series, including, “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” “Ripley Under Ground,” “Ripley’s Game,” and “The Boy Who Followed Ripley.” Her novels were hard to describe, and were mostly forced into the crime/detective genre, although they were more psychological novels with overtones of sadism and deviant sexual behavior. Although she knew a lot of people and met many of her contemporaries, she didn’t seem to have many real friends – unless you count the endless progression of female lovers that passed through her life. Most of the people who knew her didn’t really like her. There was ‘something’ about her that turned people off. Even her love affairs were relatively short-lived. She was a heavy drinker, but was able to stop cold turkey when doctors told her it was affecting her health – although she started up again after only three weeks on the wagon. She was also a heavy smoker. When diagnosed with lung cancer, she stopped out of fear – only to start again when she learned that the tumor was glandular and not caused by cigarettes. She had a love of snails, and managed to amass quite a collection for herself that she kept as pets. She wrote snails into many of her plots. She seemed to be a collection of rebellious habits and a vigorous individualist. I have to admit that I have only seen “Strangers on a Train” out of all the movies made from her novels, and that I have only read “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” out of all her novels. This will soon be corrected since I have a couple more of her novels on my pile to read. If you have a great deal of patience and a lot of time, I can recommend this well-written and exhaustively researched biography.(less)

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Feb 08, 2010 Bookmarks Magazine rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: mar-apr-2010

Schenkar takes an experimental approach to her detailed biography of novelist Patricia Highsmith, the result of meticulous research and multiple interviews. Eschewing a conventional chronological structure, she organizes her narrative loosely around Highsmith's obsessions and secrets, allowing her to move across years and continents in the space of a few pages. Though the New York Times Book Review lauded the biography as "a model of its kind," other critics found the layout confusing and repeti...more

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Dec 25, 2009 Michelle rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2009

This is massive, epic tome of a biography. Though the writing was excellent and the research impeccable I can't imagine anyone who has just a passing interest in the life of Patricia Highsmith whipping through all 600 pages with glee. This is absolutely why I didn't rate this higher. I just don't care that hard about the woman - there was too much information for the casual admirer (if I could even consider myself that). The woman was weird, at best (kept pet snails) and deplorable in many insta...more

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May 03, 2010 aya rated it 4 of 5 stars

Recommended to aya by: michelle gave it to me!

everything i've read about patricia highsmith before this bio highlights how much of a monster she is. things like she had no friends, she was barely human, etc. this bio did a wonderful job of showing this side of her as well as an incredibly insecure and tortured artist who had the capacity to be an incredibly sweet friend and a passionate lover.
though incredibly thorough and insightful, the author stretches coincidences and aha! moments too far sometimes. at times she seems to want everythin...more

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Jul 21, 2011 Andy rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: No one

Recommended to Andy by: She who cannot be named

Shelves: gay-lesbian

It's nice to know that there's another Patricia Highsmith biography out there because this one's bad, very bad. Joan Schenkar's sloppy biography doesn't follow a linear timeline, so we're perpetually skating from the Forties to the Seventies to the Fifties and back. It's as if the biographer had a serious case of ADD. Consequently, the bio was very hard to follow.

There's also way too much to do about her lesbianism, i.e. there's more about that than her actual novels. Highsmith's attitude to le...more

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Dec 24, 2012 Kara rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't know what I expected.

I learned about Patricia Highsmith through the New York Times Book Review of this biography. In it, a portrait was painted of a woman writer in the 1940s and '50s whose actions seemed as sociopathic as that of one of her most famous characters, the talented Mr. Ripley. She was dark, dreamed up ugly murders for fun, wrote for comic books (though she denied it), hated her mother, and slept with women (and sometimes men) -- sometimes for love but often for sport.

I wan...more

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Aug 03, 2011 Anne rated it 4 of 5 stars

As a bonafide mystery reader, for years I've been haunted by the disturbing and hypnotic aspects of some of Patricia Highsmith's books, such as "Strangers on a Train". In this definitive biography, Joan Schenkar reveals the equally disturbing and not particularly likable author. Although Schenkar's reach may just exceed her stretch in some of her interpretations of "Highsmith Country", she did have unparalleled access to archival material and people who knew Highsmith. She writes a compelling st...more

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Aug 18, 2010 Ana rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: biographies, non-fiction

Finally finished this tome. Sigh. What to say about this mess?

I'd read one of Miss Highsmith's books before and look forward to reading a few more that are on my shelf. So I came to this bio with very little knowledge about her beyond what might be mentioned in the 'About the Author' page in her books. Well, i know a lot about her now. Maybe too much. Unfortunately what i know is mostly disjointed, since that's how Schenkar decided to present her info. There was so much there to play with and ye...more Finally finished this tome. Sigh. What to say about this mess?

I'd read one of Miss Highsmith's books before and look forward to reading a few more that are on my shelf. So I came to this bio with very little knowledge about her beyond what might be mentioned in the 'About the Author' page in her books. Well, i know a lot about her now. Maybe too much. Unfortunately what i know is mostly disjointed, since that's how Schenkar decided to present her info. There was so much there to play with and yet she chose to present it in the oddest most convoluted way.

She had 14 chapters dedicated to 'Les Girls' alone. Yes, Highsmith slept with a whole lot of women (and even some men) but do we need 14 separate chapters about it? How about just telling the story of her life in context, i.e. chronologically? One chapter I'm reading about her death, the next chapter I'm reading about her twenties - it was too much.

Plus Schenkar was definitely in need of a better editor to reel in the extraneous detail. Do we really need to know that some random person Highsmith met one time was actually the great-granddaughter of Teddy Roosevelt? When you first notice these little factoids, they seem interesting, but after reading hundreds of these - which do not have any discernible connection to the biography - it wears one down. Gratuitous factoids I called them.

And Schenkar must think that her readers cannot remember one bit of info from one chapter to another. I lost track of the times that she repeated herself. Maybe this book was meant to be a 'dip in, dip out' sort of bio, so she felt the need to repeat all that information. If so, I think she did Patricia Highsmith a disservice.

Highsmith might not have been a very nice woman, but she was tremendously interesting and her life did not need gratuitous factoids about random peripheral people to pad it out. And she certainly deserved better than a biographer who consistently hinted that there was something deeply wrong with her, at one point hilariously suggesting that if Pat had been a teenager 6 decades later, that she would've committed some sort of Columbine like attack!

I really can't recommend this book at all, to anyone. The best I can say about it and which is why I gave it 2 stars instead of just 1, is that i think it's the only comprehensive bio available of Highsmith. Hopefully a better writer with fewer prejudices will come along and do a better job of showing us Pat's life. (less)

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Aug 05, 2010 Shannon rated it 2 of 5 stars

so living two blocks from a library now is a truly magical thing. i got a few books out last week but this one is due first.

things i like about the book so far: highsmith is a mental

thing I dislike about the book so far: schenkar has no respect for chronology, which is fine for schenkar, and i suppose there is something nice about grouping things thematically, but this is taken to extremes and is often irritating to the reader who is confronted with rambling and bizarre thematic lists. accordin...more

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Feb 25, 2010 Michelle Delcarlo rated it 3 of 5 stars

A not so excellent biography of an excellent writer. Highsmith's The Price of Salt is an intricately woven web of lesbian love written at a time when such complex relationships were not allowed. The author of her biography tends to loose sight of how tender this complication can be and instead hits you over the head with Highsmith's alcoholism, sexual nefariousness, and how much she hated her mother. I have to admit I only got through three quarters of the book, yet felt I was reading the same t...more

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Feb 04, 2010 Karen rated it 3 of 5 stars

I'd rate it a bit less than a 3. The wealth of material on Highsmith turns into overkill in the hands of author Schenkar. Yes, we are happy that Highsmith kept a diary for decades, but we don't need all the details unless they are essential to her life, and more importantly, relate to her writing. Once Schenkar reports about halfway through that Highsmith was rather blank about her own writing, we realize that a major reason for reading the book has just been squashed flat: we will not receive m...more I'd rate it a bit less than a 3. The wealth of material on Highsmith turns into overkill in the hands of author Schenkar. Yes, we are happy that Highsmith kept a diary for decades, but we don't need all the details unless they are essential to her life, and more importantly, relate to her writing. Once Schenkar reports about halfway through that Highsmith was rather blank about her own writing, we realize that a major reason for reading the book has just been squashed flat: we will not receive much insight into her writing. Since she's mainly known to Americans as the author of deliciously twisted stories, this is truly a letdown.

I did like the story about her being at Yaddo with Flannery O'Connor, and the brief mentions of her Hitchcock projects, but could have done with less about all her many lovers. If one is obsessed with a subject, perhaps one does want to know every person the subject slept with, but I don't think most readers care that much.

The point that is made over and over--that Highsmith was neurotic, alcoholic, disturbed and eccentric--could have been toned down nicely. Readers get tired of being hit over the head. I always question a biographer's agenda in making sure the reader knows just how weird and strange a writer is. In Highsmith's case, her shame over her lesbianism is a valid reason for her pain, not strange at all, given how unacceptable lesbianism was in provincial America of Highsmith's time. At the time of her death, she no longer even had an American publisher. Wouldn't this bio have been more interesting if Schenkar had focused more on the social context instead of Highsmith's love life!

Last, the actual writing leaves something to be desired. Schenkar overuses the parenthesis, and needs to learn a basic law of writing: do not put essential information in parentheses. What you put in parentheses may be discarded, an extra not central to the sentence. Secondly, I got tired of the precious "cahier" for notebook, and the repetition of seemingly unimportant phrases, e.g. that Patricia Highsmith was once again battling her mother's sunny brand of Christian Science.(less)

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Aug 17, 2010 Liz rated it 3 of 5 stars

Patricia Highsmith was an interesting person to read about. She was a talented writer who was a bit of a narcissist. She managed to get into some interesting troubles because of her personality and her writing. I liked her quirkiness although I don't think I would ever want to be friends with someone like her.

I liked the biographer's voice here, but I think Schenkar was too in love with her own cleverness that I got annoyed with the repetitive titles and the, "We'll get to that later" kind of c...more

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Feb 04, 2011 Karen rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: won-t-finish

I adore a long juicy biography, and if the subject is a renowned author living during a period of time I find interesting, more the better. That's what this book on Patricia Highsmith, author of The Talented Mr. Ripley and openly lesbian during the 1950's (!) should have been, but sadly it was a huge disappointment. It jumped around like a jackrabbit from one time to another, one scene to another, one lover to another, until I really stopped caring. Note to biographers and memoir writers: Start...more

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Jan 04, 2010 Trissa rated it 2 of 5 stars

The author talks about Virginia Woolf's theory about biographies - there are the facts and the rest is fiction. In a time of memoirs, I agree with this completely.
About 40 pages in I was tired of the author's writing style. She was trying to write the bio more like a novel and every sentence seemed to have additional information in parenthesis. Her quotes from Highsmith were awkward and forced.
The best part of the book is in the appendix where the author states "just the facts." It's a timeline...more

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Mar 06, 2013 Jody rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013, addiction, biography, brought-the-researcher-out-in-me, controversial, i-want-to-read-more-by-this-author, lgbt

“She wasn’t nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well
would have called her a generous woman.”—from ‘A Note on Biography’, The Talented Miss Highsmith

Where to start? I was consumed by Patricia Highsmith’s life for several days and feel like I can finally take a deep breath and collect my thoughts. I've never read about anyone remotely like her. She's a labyrinth of different traits on a spectrum from admirable to despicable. At her worst, she's a bigot and a misanthrope. At her...more “She wasn’t nice. She was rarely polite. And no one who knew her well
would have called her a generous woman.”—from ‘A Note on Biography’, The Talented Miss Highsmith

Where to start? I was consumed by Patricia Highsmith’s life for several days and feel like I can finally take a deep breath and collect my thoughts. I've never read about anyone remotely like her. She's a labyrinth of different traits on a spectrum from admirable to despicable. At her worst, she's a bigot and a misanthrope. At her best, she's funny, talented, devoted to her many lovers (of all creeds) and obviously an incredible writer who uses her dark emotions to great advantage in her works. She had a compulsion to write about love yet felt that death was very much part of that equation. It's clear that her books disturbed many an unprepared reader.

I read this biography with no other information on Highsmith except for seeing the movie version of The Talented Mr Ripley, which I'm now reading with great enthusiasm. I had heard of her through the literary grapevine and was intrigued by her ability to examine the depths of some very warped characters. I certainly got the impression that Highsmith was quite a fascinating person and I'm never one to turn away a biography on eccentric writers. (and what writer isn't eccentric?) However, now I know all the plots and many endings of books I've yet to read so it’s a HUGE spoiler alert for those interested in this. I'm still looking forward to the creepy ride into ‘Highsmith Country’ though. I'm already reading The Talented Mr Ripley and lamenting that I'm almost done.

Lastly, this was hard for me to rate. Joan Schenkar seems to have gone through every shred of Highsmith's papers, interviewed anyone she ever knew and extensively details, as mentioned above, most of her books. She's clearly a devoted fan. The footnotes got annoying, as well as her notations that a 'previous biography' got some random fact wrong. As other reviewers have complained, this wasn't in chronological order so I was often trying to figure out how old she was and what year it was. I did on the whole, though,enjoy her writing style even though sections of this book were incredibly boring due to her obsessive attention to every iota of Highsmith’s life. Parts of the bio were a 5 star read and others a 1 . All in all though, I don't regret reading it as I'm very excited to read pretty much everything Patricia Highsmith ever wrote now.
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Oct 25, 2012 Janet added it · review of another edition

Shelves: nonfiction, biography

I picked up this biography out of curiosity. The central tenet of mystery novels is morality. Someone violates decency and/or the law, they are caught, and balance is restored. Highsmith violated all of that. Her best known are Strangers on a Train, and the several books in The Talented Mr. Ripley series.[return][return]Surprise, surprise -- I found out that she was an unpleasant woman. Not as amoral as her characters, but she was not a comfortable person to know. I read the first hundred pages,...more

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Feb 01, 2011 Beth Anne rated it 4 of 5 stars

I'm not sure what compelled me to pick this up. Bought it on my birthday. Haven't actually read ANY Highsmith, none at all, and this complicated portrait was interestingly constructed, but also sometimes irritating. I felt wrapped up in anxiety and confusion, not unlike the subject of the book, who seems to have lived a very interesting, very driven, but ultimately lonely life. That said, I was compelled to finish this and subsequently read a collection of her short stories, so hey, good stuff....more

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Apr 11, 2010 Jean rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: biography, literary-life, relationship-gay

Big – near 700 pages counting the many pages of footnotes and index sort of things – and at times fascinating bio of writer Patricia Highsmith. Ms. Highsmith wrote in a (hard to easily categorize) suspense/psychological thriller/morbid vein. The author had access to some diaries and material others hadn’t, and interviewed dozens of friends and sources.

Although Ms. Schenkar did an admirable job unearthing and synthesizing info, she sometimes seems to have a vicariously possessive, or even rapaci...more

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Feb 19, 2010 J. rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: ... highsmith completists ...

Shelves: bio, highsmith

Strangely enough, I didn't love this. But I'm not sure I can say I've read every last bit of footnoted addendum, oblique reference, unattached factoid and free-floating nanobit, because of the way I read it -- and the way it was written.

Ms Shenkar seems to have had ample access to Highsmith in the very late years of the legendary mystery author's life; she certainly had near total access to the effects & papers of the estate. Odd & personal details -- a pair of 501 jeans given to Shenkar...more
Strangely enough, I didn't love this. But I'm not sure I can say I've read every last bit of footnoted addendum, oblique reference, unattached factoid and free-floating nanobit, because of the way I read it -- and the way it was written.

Ms Shenkar seems to have had ample access to Highsmith in the very late years of the legendary mystery author's life; she certainly had near total access to the effects & papers of the estate. Odd & personal details -- a pair of 501 jeans given to Shenkar by Highsmith still "hold the shape of her body" ....... are offered wherever possible. Any biographer must dig to find meaningful detail, but sometimes this feels a little bit too prying, too invasive, without necessary cause. Just how the transaction occured and what the terms may have been aren't really stipulated here, and it leaves the reader with an uneasy sense of the whole thing. The fact that Highsmith's fiction had a lot to do with disguises, snooping, counterfeits & poses ... doesn't reconcile any similar approach in a biography.

So, then, with the creepy quibbles out of the way, how's the bio work out ? Well, we go straight to more quibbles, unfortunately. Somewhere in the middle of this I decided that if Schenkar wasn't going to follow much of any kind of chronology--- stringing associations, acquantainces, semi-relevant details & back-stories, connections direct or vague together, in time-warping clusters --- that I was going to stop reading it chronologically. Using the appendices, index and the author's own associations in the text, I proceeded Google style throughout the rest of the book: like a long internet-search, you can spiral around and through the book on topics of interest, and yet never turn more than three or four pages consecutively. Fair is fair; she wrote it this way.

Beyond all the bumps and roadblocks that crop up, you do have to say that Shenkar 'gets' Highsmith -- the deeply disturbing fictional elements of disguise, impersonation, transgression and transformation -- the heart, the pulse, of Highsmith's work. That Highsmith may have been a bit off the rails by the end of her life doesn't help the book, though. And that Shenkar may well have been the mouse in a dotty old rich lady's game of Legendary Lion and Biographer Mouse isn't entertained.

But an early anecdote in the book gets right at the Problem Of Patricia :

... All through the 1970s, at her house in the hamlet of Moncourt (the house she loved the best and the one she kept the longest), Pat had a near neighbor, a Czechoslovakian émigré who occasionally did odd jobs for her. Monsieur Knet was exactly the kind of self-made man Pat liked to trade small talk with. He used to return home from his night job, in the early-morning hours, and note the lighted roof window in Pat's upstairs bedroom -- the only light visible at that hour in the hameau --and the sound of her venerable Olympic portable typewriter clickety-clacking across the courtyard...

And that is how Monsieur Knet remembered Patricia to me: a sharply syncopated sound in the night, a rectangle of eerie illumination, a woman sitting at her desk, writing, he said, "frightful things dripping with blood" ...

As mentioned, Shenkar really gets Highsmith, as this brief vision aptly illustrates; the body of work, from The Talented Mr Ripley to Strangers On A Train, is very much an eerie illumination in the dead hours of the night... Perhaps a shorter, more discreetly-framed analytical appreciation, some deft editorial oversight that reins in the factoid-epidemic -- might have saved this biography from being the gossip-ridden mess that it is.
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Mar 25, 2011 Sull rated it 3 of 5 stars

Well, this book is endless (perhaps unfinishable). The chapters are long & go by themes like "Les Girls - Part 1" and "La Mama - Part 4" instead of in chronological order as in most biographies. Highsmith's mother deserves 4 chapters because she's the figure who may have provoked Highsnith's interest/obsession with murder, though the author herself states several times that it was her stepfather who played that role. This book is so disorganized that even I (who often read biogs wrong way ar...more

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About Joan Schenkar

JOAN SCHENKAR has been called "America's most original female contemporary playwright." TRULY WILDE, her biography of Oscar's interesting niece Dolly Wilde, was hailed as "a revelation, the great story of a life and of the creation of modern culture." THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH has already been acclaimed as the "definitive" Highsmith biography.

As a child actor in Seattle, Schenkar made many telev...more JOAN SCHENKAR has been called "America's most original female contemporary playwright." TRULY WILDE, her biography of Oscar's interesting niece Dolly Wilde, was hailed as "a revelation, the great story of a life and of the creation of modern culture." THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH has already been acclaimed as the "definitive" Highsmith biography.

As a child actor in Seattle, Schenkar made many television and stage appearances (one of them was with Everett Edward Horton) and was a touring member of the corps de ballet of The Cornish Ballet Company. She wrote her first play while living in The Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan.

The recipient of more than forty grants, fellowships, and awards for her "comedies of menace" (including seven National Endowment for the Arts grants), Schenkar has been reviewed in every major (and many minor) newspaper in the English-speaking theatre world. She has been playwright-in-residence in universities, artists' colonies, as well as in such experimental theatre companies as Joseph Chaikin’s Winter Project, The Polish Laboratory Theatre, and The Minnesota Opera New Music Theatre Ensemble. She is an alumna of New Dramatists, and a current member of The Authors Guild, Societe des auteurs et compositeurs dramatiques, PEN, The Dramatists’ Guild, and The Brontë Society. She was founder and artistic director of Force Majeure Productions in New York City. The London theatre company, SIGNS OF LIFE THEATRE, was named after her play and a road in Pownal, Vermont has been named after her. She has an ABD in English and American literature and aesthetics.

Her published plays include one of the most widely-produced and studied plays in the history of theatre written by women, SIGNS OF LIFE. She has had more than five hundred productions of her work on stage, radio, and video, including the following plays: CABIN FEVER, SIGNS OF LIFE, THE LODGER, BUCKS AND DOES, MR. MONSTER, THE LAST OF HITLER, BETWEEN THE ACTS, HUNTING DOWN THE SEXES, FULFILLING KOCH’S POSTULATE, FAMILY PRIDE IN THE 50’s, FIRE IN THE FUTURE, THE UNIVERSAL WOLF, BURNING DESIRES.

Feature articles about JOAN SCHENKAR’s work have appeared in such publications as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times,The Village Voice, The Washington Post, The Denver Post, and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. She is the subject of articles and interviews in such scholarly and theatrical journals as: TDR, Theatre Journal, PAJ, Modern Drama, Women and Performance, Michigan Quarterly Review, Studies in American Drama, Alternatives Theatrales, and Feminist Re-visions. Her short stories have been published in several anthologies.

SIGNS OF LIFE: Six Comedies of Menace, a collection of her plays, was published in 1998 and was a Wesleyan University Press best-seller. TRULY WILDE: the unsettling story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar’s unusual niece was published by Basic Books/Perseus in New York, Virago Press/Little Brown in London and RandomHouse/ Mondadori in Barcelona in 2000 and 2001 and was a finalist for The Lamda Literary Award. Her latest work –- a literary biography of Patricia Highsmith, THE TALENTED MISS HIGHSMITH: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith -- has just been published by St Martin's Press (New York), and will be published by Diogenes Verlag (Zurich), and Circe Press (Barcelona) in 2010.

JOAN SCHENKAR lives and writes in Paris and Greenwich Village.(less)

More about Joan Schenkar...

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“When Pat gave her ‘criminal-hero’ Tom Ripley a charmed and parentless life, a wealthy, socially poised Alter Ego (Dickie Greenleaf), and a guilt-free modus operandi (after he kills Dickie, Tom murders only when necessary), she was doing just what her fellow comic book artists were doing with their Superheroes: allowing her fictional character to finesse situations she herself could only approach in wish fulfillment. And when she reimagined her own psychological split in Ripley’s character — endowing him with both her weakest traits (paralyzing self-consciousness and hero-worship) and her wildest dreams (murder and money) — she was turning the material of the ‘comic book’ upside down and making it into something very like a ‘tragic book.’ 'It is always so easy for me to see the world upside down,’ Pat wrote in her diary– and everywhere else.” — 2 people liked it

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