Menu
Next in the queue
60
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
59/100Critics
61/100Scholars
Author:
Patricia Highsmith, Anna von Planta
Publisher:
Liveright
Date:
November 16, 2021
Published for the centenary of Highsmith's birth, this volume weaves her diary and notebook entries, exhibiting how her personal affairs seeped into her fictionâand the sheer darkness of her imaginationâfrom her junior year at Barnard in 1941 until her death in 1995.
What The Reviewers Say
The whole book is excellent. Highsmith is pointed and dry about herself and everything else. But the early chapters are special. They comprise one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts I’ve read—and it’s a crowded field!—about being young and alive in New York City.
'I am becoming a little odd, personally,' she wrote in 1954, a fact that grew more pronounced as the years went by. It’s a startling effect of reading the diaries that one begins to understand not only why this occurred, but the impact it had on Highsmith’s fiction.
... opens a window onto this extraordinary writer’s inner life and working methods. It has been condensed from some 8,000 pages of material contained in fifty-six previously unpublished journals. The book is still, at nearly 1,000 pages, heavy as a house brick and, it must be said, relentlessly self-absorbed in tone...But there is enough here to keep us entertained as well as appalled.
Half the volume is devoted to the years 1941-1950, in which Highsmith found her feet and voice — if not herself — in the Big Apple. The city inspires some of the young Texan’s finest writing.
