Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995 [Hardcover]

The whole book is excellent. Highsmith is pointed and dry about herself and everything else. But the early chapters are special. They comprise one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts Ive read  and its a crowded field!  about being young and alive in New York City. The boldest of von Plantas editorial decisions has been to bring the diary and cahier entries together, interwoven and interlocked.... It works well.... Patricia Highsmiths lacerating diaries and notebooks... will be seen as one of the great twentieth-century artistic self-portraits. Provides stunning access to the mind of a notoriously secretive author. The To immerse yourself in [Highsmith's] private sphere, which she willingly discloses (she knew her writing would be read and published one day) is breath-taking. Now, in the year of her 100th birthday  Patricia Highsmith was born on January 19, 1921  a 1,000 page volume of her intimate diaries and notebooks (1941-1995) is being released, which allows a close-up look of this astonishing destiny: ruled by the passion to write, crowned by success and ground down by disastrous love affairs. Highsmiths company, while reading these diaries, is fascinating. It means slipping from the joyous effervescence of a youth spent in In these diaries and notebooks, one gets to know unknown sides to the crime writer: the lyrical, ecstatic and aphoristic. Reading Patricia Highsmith's diary entries filled me with a joy that goes beyond the thrill of such a literary treasure being published for the first time after almost thirty years. Offer[s] intimate insights into a writers soul  and into [Highsmith's] attempt to write a lesbian novel, which she published under a pseudonym in 1952. Her writing owes everything to this attitude: of confronting the world armed with a steel needle. The Highsmith community has been eagerly awaiting this moment: A fascinating document of cultural history. [ More than 50 years of the novelists diaries and noteboolã6