Psychopaths: New Research & Studies

[Beakmoo]

Jay B. Plangman is an excellent name.

 

[ramonmercado]

Here's an interesting article about Highsmith, her characters, her diaries and her "real voice".

Obsessions Are the Only Things That Matter: On Patricia Highsmith’s Diaries and Novels​

March 13, 2023 • By Cody Siler



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Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks: 1941–1995
PATRICIA HIGHSMITH

AT 21 YEARS OLD, Patricia Highsmith put her finger on the theme that would dominate her life’s work. “Obsessions,” she wrote, “are the only things that matter.” Now, 80 years later, the iconic suspense novelist has herself become the object of an unhealthy fixation: we are all obsessed with Pat. Last year, the writer was cast as the protagonist of a graphic novel, Grace Ellis’s Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith, and a documentary, Eva Vitija’s Loving Highsmith, while Adrian Lyne adapted her 1957 novel Deep Water into a film starring Ben Affleck. These new additions to the Patriciaverse join a crowded field; in the last two decades, a half dozen of her books have been made into movies, and she’s been the subject of three biographies and countless essays. The misanthropic writer whose morbid oeuvre provided fodder for classic films like Strangers on a Train (1951) and The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) is now in the limelight herself.

Highsmith exemplifies a quintessential archetype of today’s online culture: she is the “problematic fave” par excellence. One of the most successful suspense novelists of all time, she came of age as a lesbian in the 1940s, underwent therapy to “cure” her sexuality, and published the iconic queer love story Carol (also known as The Price of Salt) in 1952 under a pseudonym, fearing it would damage her reputation. She was also an outspoken racist, a virulent antisemite, and an emotionally abusive partner. Contemporary fascination with Highsmith dates back to her death in 1995, when 42 notebooks were discovered neatly stacked and bundled in a closet in her imposing Swiss mansion. Those diaries, which stretch all the way back to when she, as a college student, first recorded her thoughts on the theme of obsession, have provided fuel for the nearly three-decades-long litigation of her character that continues today. ...

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article...er-on-patricia-highsmiths-diaries-and-novels/

I'm reading Patricia Highsmith's Diaries and Notebooks, really interesting, engrossing, 400 pages in, only 600 to go.

Here's an article regarding her novel Edith’s Diary.

THE BACKLIST: MARGOT DOUAIHY AND POLLY STEWART REVISIT PATRICIA HIGHSMITH'S 'EDITH'S DIARY'
Discussing Highsmith's classic of toxic suburbia

Recently I had a chance to talk to her about another crime fiction original, Patricia Highsmith, and one of her lesser-known novels, Edith’s Diary. To fans of the Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train, Edith’s Diary may seem like an anomaly: an understated story of a woman who moves from New York to small-town Pennsylvania and gradually finds herself split between two lives—her real one and the one she’s created in her increasingly fictional diary entries. As Douiahy and I discussed, the quietness on the surface of this novel slowly reveals itself to be a cover for the violence that close family members can enact upon each other.

Is Edith’s Diary your favorite of Highsmith’s novels?

I’d say Edith’s Diary and Strangers on a Train are neck and neck, but if I had to choose, I’d choose Edith’s Diary for the disturbing and riveting qualities that I keep coming back to. We feel so much empathy for the characters here—not that we don’t have empathy for Bruno and Guy in Strangers on a Train. But what I’m totally mesmerized by in this novel is what Highsmith can do with the inner ecology of Edith’s character, and how she layers it structurally with the first person and third person. We experience it along with her as she becomes gradually more unmoored from reality and retreats into this completely distorted and contorted world. Something about it has the materiality of real life. I could see it happening, even though in a sense it’s so wild and extreme. And we have the experience of being completely unsettled, not knowing what’s going to happen next, which I think is the very definition of suspense. ...

https://crimereads.com/margot-douaihy-polly-stewart-patricia-highsmiths-ediths-diary/