PATRICIA HIGHSMITH'S DIARIES AND NOTEBOOKS

The intimate revelations of a sensuous, ambitious writer.

Out of nearly 5,000 pages from the notebooks and diaries of Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), editor von Planta and her team have culled about 20% to represent the author’s formative years as a writer. They begin with her first diary entry in 1941, when she was an undergraduate at Barnard, and conclude in 1950, with the publication of her first novel, Strangers on a Train, and the completion of her second, The Price of Salt. As this volume demonstrates, Highsmith poured everything into her private notebooks: desires, dreams, inspirations, frustrations, and more. Longing for “the unspeakably blissful sensation of being loved,” she recounts a flood of infatuations, affairs, seductions, and betrayals. “We seek forever,” she writes, “one other human heart we can touch and who can touch ours.” Aside from a chronicle of sex with many women (and a few men, one of whom became her fiance), Highsmith records her efforts to be recognized as a writer. After graduating from college in 1942, she failed to get a job at a glossy magazine—the New Yorker or Harper’s Bazaar, for example. Short-term gigs ended when she found a job as a researcher and scriptwriter for a monthly comic magazine, which supported her for several years and gave her time to work on her fiction. “I am writing like K. Boyle,” she exulted, “with many adjectives, many strong sensuous words that one feels in the body.” In 1943, she sold her first story, and the next year she took her first trip abroad, to Mexico. Her love life in New York’s queer community was energetic and fueled by alcohol. Often, she dated several women concurrently, a practice that didn’t end well, and she was drawn to successful older women. As in a previous collection, this one contains a foreword by Highsmith’s biographer Joan Schenkar and succinct introductions for each year.

A close look at a tumultuous life.