Patricia Highsmith – Inner Life
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Previous post Repley’s Game links to films trailers + Jeannette Winterson’s delicious article on Highsmith.
Kirsten Dunst and Viggo Mortensen in The Two Faces of January , this film was also based on a novel by Patricia Highsmith.
Young Patricia Highsmith 
in 1930 (click to see large)
Highsmith endures a depresson equal to hell (Kate Hart – this recording)
What I found by reading through her notebooks written in the postwar period, when she wrote her most celebrated novels The Talented Mr. Ripley and Strangers on a Train, was not the ramblings of a homophobe or a misogynist, but a series of conflicted, even anguished entries about being a lesbian in Cold War America. Highsmith was frustrated, horrified, baffled and intrigued by her sexuality, and at times, defensive and proud of being gay.
Click to see large 
Patricia Highsmith – the Anatomy of Melancholy – born January 19, 1921.
I felt guilty enjoying the novels of Patricia Highsmith. Later I realized that the guilt comes not from reading thrillers but from her ingenious method of making the reader identify with the murderer. She is a great Dostoyevskian crime writer.