This article is part of T’s Book Club, a series of essays and events dedicated to classic works of American literature. Click here to R.S.V.P.
to a virtual conversation about “The Talented Mr. Ripley,” to be led by Edmund White and held on April 22. Who was Patricia Highsmith?
Most answers warrant a rebuttal. The writer was a collision of contradictions, a woman for whom every aspect of herself (including being a woman) demanded internal debate.
In her private life, she swung dramatically between polar states of desire and disgust. Her personal journals that she kept her whole life — separate from what she called her “cahiers,” or notebooks in which she worked on her fiction — reveal a woman at the mercy of her emotional tides, drawn to the.