What to Read Before and After Seeing Loving Highsmith

Join Lit Hub at Film Forum on Friday, September 2, at 8 p.m. ET, where we’ll be co-presenting a screening of the new film Loving Highsmith, an exploration of the infamous thriller writer’s life and oeuvre. CrimeReads associate editor Olivia Rutigliano will introduce the film and moderate a Q&A with filmmaker Eva Vitija. Get up to two discounted $11 tickets (regular $15) to the screening and first two weeks of showings by entering promo code LITHUB at checkout. 

Film Forum will be selling Highsmith’s recently published diaries, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941-1995, as well as paperback editions of Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt. Tune in as well for Highsmith on Screen, a sidebar series of Highsmith film adaptations.

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Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995), not unlike her infamous protagonist, the charming and deadly Tom Ripley, led a double life. She assiduously hid her lesbianism from her family and reading public. Her psychological thrillers, rooted in obsessive love, grew from the complex, contradictory life of a child rejected by the mother she adored (“I am married to my mother / I shall never wed another” she wrote at age 19).

Eva Vitija’s tribute includes appearances by women who knew and loved her (“she had a staggering number of conquests”) and who testify to a driven personality whose private notebooks and diaries (found posthumously in a laundry closet) detail multitudinous turbulent affairs. Strangers on a Train, her first novel, became the Alfred Hitchcock classic. Her second, The Price of Salt (published pseudonymously in 1952), dared to give lesbian lovers a happy ending and was soundly rejected by publishers. Decades later, it was made into the Todd Haynes film Carol, starring Cate Blanchett and Rooney Mara.

Highsmith was a woman ahead of her time, who paid dearly for her audacity, and whose brilliant literary output belies her belief that “My life is a chronicle of unbelievable mistakes.”

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The Bloomingdale Story: Read the Never-Before Published Patricia Highsmith Draft That Would Become Carol (The Price of Salt)

Patricia Highsmith’s Malcontents, Misogynists, and Murderers: Classic and Contemporary Reviews of Five Iconic Thrillers from the “Poet of Apprehension”

Patricia Highsmith’s Confessions and Rebellions at Yaddo

Upgrade Your Writing Soundtrack with Patricia Highsmith’s Favorite Songs

A Close-Reading of The Talented Mr. Ripley as Coming of Age Story

Illustrating Patricia Highsmith’s Literary Career

Five Great Movies Based On Patricia Highsmith Books (That Aren’t The Ripley Adaptations)

Patricia Highsmith: Preying on Our Minds

Paula Hawkins on Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train, 70 Years Later

Patricia Highsmith and the Women Who Inspired Ripley