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 It has been condensed from some 8,000 pages of material contained in fifty-six previously unpublished journals.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.

The publication of a document like Highsmith’s Diaries and Notebooks would be an event in the case of any major writer. It provokes a special interest in Highsmith’s case, because it is in the nature of diaries and cahiers to engage in precisely the psychological and philosophical reflection, the confession and self-scrutiny, that she systematically excludes from the pages of her fiction and denies her characters. The result of such a revelation, however, is less to clear up than to deepen the mystery of this writer of 'mystery novels'.

The mixing of notebooks with selections from the diaries works well, providing parallel narratives, each casting light on the other, and Von Planta offers useful, short biographical introductions to the various sections. The early diaries were written in several languages so that they had to be transcribed and then translated back into English. The translators have done an excellent job, matching the voice of the diaries with that of the notebooks..

... the confessions, insights, despair, and pique in Highsmith’s journals match, if not surpass, those in the diaries of Susan Sontag—who, twelve years Highsmith’s junior, was her near equal in terms of prodigious output and shambolic lesbian love life.

Huge, sumptuous.

The mere 15 percent represented in the volume is astonishing, not only because of its value as literary history but also as an account of a woman exploring the complexities of her queerness in Manhattan’s midcentury bohemia.

Just like Highsmith’s writing, which always flirted with the line between literature and entertainment, the self that emerges from her diaries is slippery.

... painstakingly annotated for context.

... a fascinating and unprecedented look into the 'playground for [her] imagination'.

Organized chronologically, the volume includes informative introductions for each section; a helpful foreword by von Planta; an afterword by Highsmith’s biographer, Joan Shenkar, focusing on the influential women who featured in Highsmith’s sensual education; a biographical timeline; a bibliography and filmography; and a sampling of passages that Highsmith wrote in Spanish, German, French, and Italian.