Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks

Praise for Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks "Phrased in a much more direct and forthcoming voice than the low, flat, compellingly psychotic murmur she tended to use for her fictions, Pat Highsmith‘s astonishing candor in the witness stand of her personal notebooks, and heartbreaking self-exposures in the jury box of her diaries, are like nothing else in American confessional literature." -Joan Schenkar, author of The Talented Miss Highsmith "Is Patricia Highsmith a queer icon, a trans icon, or just a brilliant and lucky bitch, a bitch‘s bitch? I don‘t think I‘ve ever met a person as troubling or intelligent, frustrating and frustrated, and triumphantly alone. She‘s master diarist as much as novelist. Her Diaries and Notebooks are a portrait of a time, a long passage from the forties to the nineties, and you‘ve never traveled on this perspective before. Get on, get off, spend months and days. You can spend years." -Eileen Myles Praise for Patricia Highsmith "[Highsmith‘s] characters are irrational, and they leap to life in their very lack of reason; suddenly we realize how unbelievably rational most fictional characters are. . . . Highsmith is the poet of apprehension rather than fear." -Graham Greene "Highsmith‘s brilliance as a novelist [is] her way of making us experience life as a tightening noose. . . . She was also our great chronicler, at a time of peak social conformity, of American secret selves." -Megan O‘Grady, New York Times "The English-speaking world might casually slot her as a writer of crime fiction, but Europeans honored her as a psychological novelist, part of an existentialist tradition represented by her own favorite writers, in particular Dostoevsky, Conrad, Kafka, Gide, and Camus. . . . The Talented Mr. Ripley and its companions should at least rank among the most perversely entertaining novels of our time." -Michael Dirda, New York Review of Books