'Every adult has secrets' says one of the characters in Patricia Highsmith's lesbian novel Carol, first published under a pseudonym in 1952 as The Price of Salt. Indeed, Highsmith - author of Stranger on a Train and The Talented Mr Ripley - had more than her fair share. During her life, she felt uncomfortable about discussing the source of her fiction and refused to answer questions about her private life. Yet after her death in February 1995, Highsmith left behind a vast archive of personal documents - diaries, notebooks and letters - which detail the links between her life and her work. Drawing on these astonishingly intimate papers, together with material gleaned from her closest friends and lovers, Andrew Wilson has written the first biography of an author described by Graham Greene as the 'poet of apprehension' and by Gore Vidal as 'one of our greatest modernist writers'. In this compelling biography Andrew Wilson illuminates the dark corners of Highsmith's life, casts light on mysteries of the creative process and reveals the secrets that the writer chose to keep hidden until after her death.
Highsmith’s output was prolific – she was the author of twenty-two novels and seven volumes of short stories – but it was always the degenerate and the criminal which most fascinated her. Best known for her suspense novels and the series featuring the amoral killer Tom Ripley, Highsmith raised crime fiction to new heights, and in the process created a transgressive genre of her own.
Even as a child, Highsmith felt like an outsider. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, she was the product of an unhappy marriage – before she was born her mother tried to abort her and she did not meet her real father until she was twelve. When other girls of her age were reading fairy stories, Highsmith was dreaming of death and deviancy, gripped by the psychological case histories outlined in Dr Karl Menninger’s ‘The Human Mind’. As an adolescent she felt attracted to other girls, but was always plagued by a strange sense of guilt, and as a young woman she would undergo six months of psychoanalysis in New York so as to try to make herself heterosexual.
Andrew Wilson>/B> is a journalist who has written for most of Britain’s national newspapers, including the ‘Daily Telegraph’, the ‘Guardian’, the ‘Independent on Sunday’ and the ‘Daily Mail’. This is his first book
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Martin Edwards
- author of the highly acclaimed Harry Devlin Mysteries
