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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
"With little sympathy for his subject, Richard Bradford sees the origin of Highsmith's plots in her destructive relationships with women of higher social standing."
"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 ..."
"He seems, in any case, to have done very little original research, and most damningly (as far as I can tell), no new interviews."
"Later chapters become a depressing catalogue of bad books and bad health ..."
"Others will seek to untangle her tormented psyche, but Bradford's has the edge over the two previous biographies by Wilson and Joan Schenkar, if only because it is less than half the length of either."
"Bradford gives a vivid sense of those formative years, deftly compressing the baggier episodes, and he conveys with similar economy Highsmith's early experiences in New York City ..."
"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."
"how could Bradford, having visited the Highsmith archive and scanned eight thousand pages of lacerating self-analysis, not feel at least some sympathy for his subject, or have gained at least some understanding of how the popular and optimistic student became the rancid and pessimistic recluse?"
"Though it breaks little new ground, the book is a happy mixture of biography and criticism."
"This book is a valuable corrective to more unquestioning portrayals of her ..."
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