36: Patricia Highsmith - Her Diaries and Notebooks (ed. Anna von Planta)
Confession: I didn’t read every single word of these nigh-on 1,000 pages. I did begin with the best of intentions, when the future author is a teenager resentfully sharing a cramped home with her mother and stepfather, but it quickly dawned on me that life was too short to plough through an endless procession of near-identical diary entries, and I started just picking out selected chunks.
Pat was a remarkable young woman who, while still a lowly student at Barnard College, flung herself into the New York nightlife of avant garde clubs and bars, with the emphasis on the gay scene - she never seems to have been in the slightest doubt that she was a lesbian, although she had flings with men and even contemplated marriage occasionally. She was also determined to be a writer, and pursued that aim at fever-pitch, amid epic amounts of alcohol and countless angst-ridden affairs with unattainable women, until her first book, Strangers on a Train, was a critical success when she was 28.
There was a lot of interest about these diaries before they appeared, and they're still only a fraction of her obsessive self-interrogation. For all that I frequently wanted to tell the young Pat to calm down and cut back on the social whirl (and for goodness sake stop getting into doomed triangular relationships), there’s something very sad about her later, increasingly reclusive and embittered exile in Europe, living in French villages she didn’t like and with only her pet snails and cats for company. Success didn’t seem all it was cracked up to be.
It didn’t help terribly that the footnotes here aren’t that great and approximately a million people are mentioned, many with the same name (I lost count of how many Marys there were), so at some point I’ll be reading the biography of her that’s on my tbr pile in the hope that'll explain a few things.