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 lesbianism was very twisted anyway, because Highsmith always cast women as the villains in her novels and didn't like women much outside of the bedroom. Highsmith's racism and her anti-semitism also comes across as very confused and disturbed (i.e., she complained about "The Negro Problem" but was a big Chester Himes fan, she worked for and befriended more Jews than anyone I know). I'm going to hit the other Highsmith bio, I want to read about a great writer, her sexual proclivities just don't seem that important within the context of her career.