| Patricia Highsmith |
Patricia Highsmith's low point – her Diaries and Notebooks reviewed by Richard Davenport-Hines
BY RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINESNovember 2021
Patricia Highsmith's journals brim over with the over-emphatic, incomprehensible and rambling ruminations of an old soak. By Richard Davenport-Hines-
Patricia Highsmith was recently described by a leading American literary critic, Terry Castle, as ‘everyone’s favourite mess-with-your-head morbid misanthrope’ and a ‘mind-blitzingly drunk and hellacious bigot’.
She was also the novelist who achieved early acclaim with Strangers on a Train (1950) and later made the murderous sociopath Tom Ripley into the quasi-hero of five novels.