For the first time, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries will be available to the public.
Big publication news: over twenty-five years after they were discovered among her bed linens and towels, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries will be released to the public this fall in a global release by Liveright Publishing (North America) and Weidenfeld & Nicholson (UK and Commonwealth). The November publication of Diaries and Notebooks will mark the hundredth anniversary of Highsmith’s birth.
Diaries and Notebooks weighs in at a whopping 995 pages of text, which was in turn whittled down from over 8000 pages and 56 thick spiral notebooks by her editor Anna von Planta. The diaries and notebooks span Highsmith’s entire adult life and cover over six decades of literary ambition, travel, and romantic tumult.
Said von Planta to The Bookseller, “What amazed and touched me most when delving into the diaries and notebooks was to discover the raw and unrestrained voice of the young Pat: self-conscious in her early notebooks, in which she hatched her first stories; often gushing in her diaries, which tell of frequent heartbreak, difficult choices, hard-won professional triumphs and a furiously fast-paced social life. It was to witness the painful becoming of Patricia Highsmith.”
“[Highsmith’s] diaries offer an unparalleled, unforgettable insight into her life and thoughts, whether about good and evil, loneliness and intimacy, sexuality and sacrifice, or love and murder,” said Lettice Franklin, W&N’s publishing director. “The diaries offer all the pleasures of her extraordinary novels—her dazzling prose, her psychological acuity, her storytelling and her style—and I know they will be treasured by her many, many readers.”
[h/t The Bookseller]
