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The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life And Serious Art Of Patricia Highsmith (2009)

by Joan Schenkar(Favorite Author)

3.47 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

0312303750 (ISBN13: 9780312303754)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

St. Martin's Press

review 1: A brilliant 3-D biography of Highsmith, born Mary Patricia Plangman in Ft. Worth, Texas, made less effective by Joan Schenkar's obvious dislike and disapproval of her eclectic, possibly sociopathic subject. But she can't take away from Highsmith's brilliant decade as a writer and romantic adventurer in '40s NYC, which culminated in the publication of "Strangers on a Train" before Highsmith was 30.I have never read a bio before where I got a niggling impression that the biographer had secretly been sexually involved with the subject (and was hiding this), but the obsessive detail of this book and the personal animus against Highsmith made me wonder. Since Patricia Highsmith had so many lovers, many of them younger women, this isn't as unlikely as it seems...The description ... moreof Highsmith's tortured relationship with her narcissistic mother, Mary, who died at 95 just three years before her daughter did, is absolutely gripping.I compare Highsmith to John Cheever, another unhappy, queer alcoholic who kept obsessive diaries. Yet Cheever stayed married all his life; Highsmith was unable to keep a lover for long. But then, perhaps she was more honest with herself. Her flashes of self-awareness make her likable to me, though I can see that she had a terribly dark side and, in the end, drove everyone away except casual acquaintances and her Swiss publisher.There's just so much good material here that I have to give it four stars.
review 2: I liked this bio, but Schenkar had to deal with 8,000 unreliable pages of diaries and journals, and has chosen a loopy rambling style, rather than a more focused, coherent approach. After 200 pages I no longer felt that I was learning anything more about Highsmith.Schenkar criticizes Highsmith for seeing Oscar Wilde's monument in Pere Lachaise, and getting the decade wrong when it was erected. However, neither Highsmith nor Schenkar seem to have noticed the that the figure with an Egyptian headdress on Wilde's tomb was also wearing an anachronistic necktie. less

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