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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
"Bradford doesn't, in contrast to his predecessors ..."
"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 ..."
"It's hard to see why Bradford's Highsmith deserves a biography, sceptical as he is about her literary merit and her personal morals."
"All of this is fascinating, but it is not really new ..."
"catastrophic literalism...defines his style ..."
"Bradford's psychosexual interpretations of Highsmith's 'sadomasochistic catastrophes,' however, sometimes strain credulity ..."
"Near its end, Bradford, in judgment, refers to Highsmith's 'execrable true self.' Readers will find it hard to disagree."
"It may be relationship drama, or a childhood trauma, or a dream, or a fleeting impression: a face glimpsed in a crowd, a moth circling a light bulb."
"This is not that biography."
"By the end, not surprisingly, Bradford seems overtaken by a kind of reductive mania."
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