how many hours of my life was i willing to spend with this milk-chugging, antisocial, misogynistic snail pervert sociopath....the answer, dear reader, was too many. if you've wanted to be regaled with accounts of the world's worst lover, most miserable dinner companion, and yeah ok briliant master of suspense you're gonna blow your top when u see just how....many....horrible anecdotes there are. s/o to schenkar who clearly about 50 pages into the book--after spending god knows how long looking into highsmith's chilling interior life--is so sick of her subject she can barely contain herself w/ cutty asides. good biographer? bad biographer? it seems no1 sld have been given the task.

some "highlights" (lowlights???): chilling list in which highsmith ranked her lovers, strange topless photo of highsmith in the glossy pics section (WHY???), exhaustingly detailed accounts of highsmith's bigotry including how she wrote a 12pg radio play rife w/ naziism, anecdote about highsmith inviting her girlfriend over after declaring her love for another woman in writing on all of the mirrors in lipstick, an account of highsmith possibly poisoning a man she didn't like at a dinner party, diary entries about watching her snails make love, anecdotes about the things that made highsmith laugh which were mostly death camps or having to do with debilitating physical/mental ailments

i left this book knowing one thing for certain--patricia highsmith's novels operate at the margins of terror & insanity solely because she herself was crafted in the darkest depths of hell. also i would not put murder past this woman. ( )

Much like (I imagine) Patricia Highsmith herself, this biography is best consumed in binge doses, set down for long periods of time, dabbled in, put down again, binged on, repeat...

The chapters are organized thematically instead of chronologically, which saves Schenkar (and the reader) the chore of reiterating uninteresting details in order to draw connections.

For the die-hard Highsmith fan--maybe 70/30 salacious gossip/cultural & literary context. ( )

Patricia Highsmith is best known for her "Ripliad" -- five novels featuring an engaging murderer, Tom Ripley. This criminally attractive man is the enemy of all things conventional, as was his creator.

Moments before her death, Highsmith urged a visiting friend to leave, repeating, "Don't stay, don't stay." Highsmith wanted nothing more than to die alone, according to her biographer, who concludes, "Everything human was alien to her."

Highsmith, a native Texan, was born restless, her mother said. The novelist kept moving to new venues all over Europe, acquiring and discarding female lovers and denouncing all of them. They were poor substitutes for the mother she loved and hated.

This mother fixation was just one of the Highsmith passions that provoke biographer Joan Schenkar to eschew a chronological narrative. Instead, the chapters in "The Talented Miss Highsmith" (St. Martin's Press, $35) are organized around Highsmith's obsessions.

The result of this unorthodox approach is an intricate, novel-like structure that suits Schenkar's own wit. Highsmith's mother, Mary, makes several entertaining entrances -- for example, arriving in London to see her daughter "with rather less warning than the Blitz."

"Miss Highsmith" is full of wonderfully realized scenes, like the opening chapter describing with mesmerizing, miraculous detail exactly how Highsmith composed her work. She gripped her "favorite Parker fountain pen, hunched her shoulders over her roll-top desk -- her oddly jointed arms and enormous hands were long enough to reach the back of the roll while she was still seated."

Highsmith's love life is described with loving specificity garnered from sources who do not wish to be identified by their real names.

"In the delicate balance of competing truths that biography is always on the verge of upsetting, both the living and dead deserve a little protection from each other," Schenkar writes.

This panoply of lovers is new material not to be found in other books, which also failed to unearth Highsmith's surprising seven-year career writing for comic books.

For those who want the straight dope, there is a substantial appendix titled "Just the Facts." But Schenkar is at pains to reiterate that Highsmith did not develop over time; indeed, the biographer notes that Highsmith "forged chronologies to give order to her life, altering the record of her life and the purport of her writing to do so."

You don't have to buy Schenkar's thesis. In "Beautiful Shadow," Andrew Wilson produced a rather good chronological biography of Highsmith.

Nevertheless, Schenkar's methods and deep research into Highsmith's deceptive practices have yielded one of the year's best literary lives, which is also a bracing rebuke to the usual way we read biography. ( )

I picked up this biography out of curiosity. The central tenet of mystery novels is morality. Someone violates decency and/or the law, they are caught, and balance is restored. Highsmith violated all of that. Her best known are Strangers on a Train, and the several books in The Talented Mr. Ripley series.

Surprise, surprise -- I found out that she was an unpleasant woman. Not as amoral as her characters, but she was not a comfortable person to know. I read the first hundred pages, which gave me an overview of her life and her unhappy relationship with her mother. I looked at the next 500 pages, and concluded that I didn't want to spend that much time with her. I did skim them. I was amused that in her machinations to avoid taxes, she ended up dying in Switzerland and getting hit by much higher estate taxes than if she'd stayed in France or gone home to the States.

She kept thorough diaries and journals, and lied in them. Now, that's quirky. The biographer believes that she made a conscious effort to be sane. It was fun to learn that she did quite well writing comic books before getting short stories and novels published. I was surprised to learn that her roots were in Texas. She was anorexic (at least in her youth, but always thin), racist, anti-Semitic (with various Jewish friends), alcoholic, and a lesbian. She gave heterosexuality a bit of a try in her youth, but decided to give it a pass. The money she was making in comics no doubt helped her be independent.

In order to enter into the dark, duplicitous, driven, and, in several respects, admirably disciplined life of her subject, Patricia Highsmith, the biographer, Joan Schenkar, uses an unusual, semi-non-chronological form that continues to tell the story of Highsmith's life. The chapters are like facets in a jewel rather than installments in a chronological account, This makes this book ideal for browsing about it, for it is long, and it also makes the subject infinitely more interesting, for when I reconsidered the matter I realized that I would have found Highsmith's obsessive repetitiveness wearisome given in linear order. So the unusual form--which can seem annoying at first--is an artistic achievement. I wish there had been more about the artistic achievements of what I consider her greatest works, including _Strangers on a Train_, _The Price of Salt_ and _The Talented Mr. Ripley. But the lengthy discussion of Highsmith's work in the comics (which she hid in shame) and the long disquisitions on Highsmith's wretched anti-Jewish animus were fascinating and bleak. My theory is that The Price of Salt was inspired by Wonder Woman, in her first Earth incarnation. There has always been constant confusion about the identity of Wonder Woman and Highsmith wanted to write for this illustrious comic. ( )