Diarios y cuadernos, 1941-1995

Patricia Highsmith, who in life earned a reputation for misanthropy and maintained an aura of secrecy about her private life, left some personal diaries and notebooks when she died in a closet among her clothes. Her editor, Anna von Planta, has immersed herself in more than eight thousand pages of annotations and has made a meticulous selection, which now finally comes to light. Without a doubt, a literary event. Here the person behind the writer emerges, with all her complexities and contradictions. The author unleashes forceful opinions -not exempt from controversy-, deals with crucial episodes of her life and also allows us to enter the "kitchen" of her literary universe and verify that her most famous creation, the sociopath Tom Ripley, is the distilled fruit of their inner demons. These texts cover Highsmith's entire life, from her student days to her last years in Switzerland, and allow us to accompany her in her youthful doubts about her sexual identity, in the endless nights of New York's Greenwich Village in the forties - of drinks with colorful characters such as Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles-, in the first glimpses of his literary vocation and the early success of Strangers on a Train -taken almost immediately to the cinema by Alfred Hitchcock-, in his time at the Yaddo artists' colony -in the company of Chester Himes and Flannery O'Connor-, in her long and convulsive love life, in the publication of her lesbian love novel The Price of Salt -later renamed Carol- with a pseudonym to avoid scandal, in her decision to go to Europe, in his fondness for alcohol...