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Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires: The Life of Patricia Highsmith
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About This Book
'My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle - may they never give me peace' PATRICIA HIGHSMITH (New Year's Eve, 1947) Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality – by parts self-destructive and malicious – and her fiction, has been largely avoided by biographers. She was openly homosexual and wrote the seminal lesbian love story, Carol. In modern times, she would be venerated as a radical exponent of the LGBT community. However, her status as an LGBT icon is undermined by the fact that she was excessively cruel and exploitative of her friends and lovers. In this new biography, Richard Bradford brings his sharp, incisive style to one of the great and most controversial writers of the twentieth century. He considers Highsmith's bestsellers in the context of her troubled personal life; her alcoholism, licentious sex life, racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and abundant self-loathing.
Reviews
"Highsmith, that mistress of deception, seems to elude her latest biographer."
"The answer is that Bradford did not consult the fifty-six diaries and cahiers at all during the writing of his biography."
"[an] engrossing biography ..."
"Bradford clearly does not admire Highsmith as a person ..."
"Bradford doesn't, in contrast to his predecessors ..."
"Brief synopses of the books convey only the basic plots, which seem flat and unconvincing ..."
"Any lively quotes or choice anecdotes almost always turn out to be borrowed or paraphrased from Wilson or Schenkar."
"Bradford's portrait of Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) is occasionally compelling but largely consumed by an unsettling, didactic preoccupation with Highsmith's same-sex promiscuity ..."
"Highsmith's love life was a roller coaster of attraction, obsession, alcoholism and trauma, but a more nuanced biography would contextualize this toxic brew within the homophobia and misogyny of the time."
"But at the other it does mean that Bradford's Highsmith becomes a figure bordering on the grotesque."
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