The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith by Joan Schenkar

 Pat couldn't look at a fllight of stairs without imagining someone falling down them.

--Joan Schenkar, The Talented Miss Highsmith (St. Martin's Press 2009)

There are a couple of different ways to write the biography of a writer, each of them problematic.  One can write about the life without going into too much criticism of the work, or one can write mostly about the work and use the life as something of a backdrop.  The Talented Miss Highsmith is unusual in that the life and the work are combined in complex ways to produce what Schenkar calls "Highsmith country."  Highsmith, a lesbian who was in the closet to some but out to most of her friends and lovers, of which there were many, in relationships that were usually short-lived and ended in acrimony and later revived as platonic friendships.  In 1952 Highsmith published the novel The Price of Salt -- a lesbian story with a relatively happy ending -- under a pseudonym, after being warned her writing career might come to an end otherwise.   It was published in 1990 under Highsmith's name; she died in 1994.

Highsmith published 22 novels and 9 short story collections, including one novel published after her death.  Schenkar finds the common themes in these novels --starting with the first one, Strangers on a Train, published in 1950 -- especially the idea of "doubles" two individuals reflecting the values of each other. Highsmith lived in Europe from 1962 until her death in Switzerland.  Her original move to Europe was to be near a lover but she stayed there, in England and France, because her novels were more successful outside of America and most of the film adaptations of them were made in France and Germany, after Hitchcock's film of Strangers on a Train in 1951.

Schenkar takes an unusual thematic approach to Highsmith's life -- chapter titles include "Les Girls" and "The Real Romance of Objects" -- though she does make regular refernces to other chapters  "(see "The Cake That Was Shaped Like a Coffin: Part 5")."   Schenkar does, however, include a chronological appendix -- "Just the Facts" -- of Highsmith's life from her birth in Texas to her move with her mother and stepfather to New York and her graduation from Julia Richmond High School (all girls) and Barnard College and her years writing comic books before writing Strangers on a Train at Yaddo, the artist's colony, to which Truman Capote recommended her.