The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life And Serious Art Of Patricia Highsmith (2009) - Plot & Excerpts
Having read both this and Andrew Wilson's biography of Pat Highsmith, what I came away with was a great compassion for Highsmith. Highsmith, at her core, was a broken person who allowed her demons to get the best of her. The "meanness", anti-social behaviors, alcholism, and odd quirks of her older years being nothing more than symptoms of the pain of self-loathing that Highsmith attributed to her mother's early rejection as well as the societally imposed moral constraints placed on homosexuality but was cultivated by herself - whether consciously or unconsciously throughout her life. Highsmith was never able to come to terms with her gender/sexuality issues or with her troubled relationship with Mother Mary and it eventually overtook her life and her talent.I developed a strong empathetic love for Highsmith as her life spiraled further and further into isolation and what I can only imagine was a slight or sometimes not so slight, madness. As for a review of this book....I think all has been said. Circuitous, verbose over-wrought langauge, confusing name-dropping, repetitive, and a subjective over analysis of its subject. What I would truly love is for someone to publish the Highsmith diaries. I much prefer a "from the horse's mouth" perspective on this fascinating woman. In this labyrinth and needlessly exhaustive biography, Joan Schenkar introduces us to the author Patricia Highsmith. Unfortunately, Highsmith is an extremely unsympathetic figure and her interesting but flawed body of work seems inadequate justification to suffer her company for so long.The Texas born, New York City raised Highsmith seems like a good subject and drawing heavily on Highsmith's own lifelong diaries and journals Schenkar begins with a detailed examination of her youth and the complex and destructive relationship she had with her commercial artist mother, Mary Coates Highsmith. This is by far the most interesting part of Highsmith's background, however, it's told in a strange non-chronological fashion cutting back & forth with reminiscences of friends and tales of love affairs; this bizarre narrative approach makes the first third of the book quite confusing.Highsmith did move in some interesting circles, and as a result we get brief glimpses of such luminaries as actress, Judy Holliday, author Arthur Koestler and a young Tommy Tune but most of the work focuses on Highsmith's own favorite subject - herself. The book is also littered with blow by blow retellings of almost all of Highsmith's many miserable love affairs with a wide variety of women and a few men but the constant flow of dysfunction and misanthropic behavior seem to reveal little of any depth and Schenkar is short on insight despite her belabored presentation.Perhaps the worst part of the story is Highsmith's general nastiness as a human being. Her vicious anti-semitism, casual racism, misogyny and self-centeredness are difficult to take and Schenkar is unable to provide enough context or deliver nuanced understanding sufficient to balance the subject. I have read books on Hitler and Stalin that were in no way this kind of drudgery to read, so it is hardly an impossible task and these subjects are both clearly far worse as individual human beings. If you want to know a lot of facts and gossip about Highsmith this book certainly fills the bill but it is not an easy read or a very enjoyable one. You'd be better off reading the author's own body of work if you want any real insight.
What do You think about The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life And Serious Art Of Patricia Highsmith (2009)?
Sounds like a fascinating biography about someone you're going to relish disliking!
—anshita31
Fascinating, disturbed woman, only read parts of the book.
—MaggieF
